Michael Smith

In Strangers on the Shore, Michael Smith – author of cult classic The Giro Playboy, which captured the arty demi-monde of Shoreditch gentrifying into a hipster hellscape – stays one step ahead of the property developers as he stumbles through the uncanny psychic landscape of Hastings, in an astonishing work of autofiction that explores the experience of becoming a father and the disarming grief of leaving your youth and its dreams behind. The flâneuring Michael at the centre of the book has moved to Hastings, started a family and opened a bar. He finds himself pouring wine in a ‘drinking town with a fishing problem,’ philosophising, procrastinating, and morbidly obsessed with Aleister Crowley. A book about what it is like to live on the margins, sliding into a precarious middle age in turbulent times, both giving up and starting a-new, Strangers on the Shore is deeply and unashamedly romantic, whilst…