Strangers on the Shore

Electronic book text

In Strangers on the Shore, Michael Smith - author of cult classic The Giro Playboy - journeys through the uncanny psychic landscape of St Leonard's in an astonishing work of autofiction that explores the experience of becoming a father and the strange grief of leaving your youth behind.

The flaneuring Michael at the centre of the book has checked out, started a family and moved to the coast 'where all alcoholics go to die': he has both given up and started anew. Obsessed with Aleister Crowley and the 'shabby magic' of this seaside place, he finds himself in a 'drinking town with a fishing problem'.

This is a book about what it is like to live on the margins, to slide into middle age unfulfilled and poor, scared, the same person but different. It is deeply and unashamedly romantic and it is also angry - at Brexit, at what Britain has become, and about seagulls too. It is a book about love, family and the unbreakable bond between father and son. Endlessly moving, Strangers on the Shore is a work of transcendent beauty from the acid house Montaigne: literally a man 'who lived to wonder at the world'.