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A genre-blending work of autofiction and memoir from the cult author of The Giro Playboy.
In Strangers on the Shore, author Michael Smith 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 down to the 'dogshit capital of the South Coast,' started a family and opened a bar. He finds himself pouring wine in a 'drinking town with a fishing problem,' philosophising, procrastinating, morbidly obsessed with Aleister Crowley, who died in poverty in a BnB in this shabby seaside resort full of artistes and occult morris dancers. 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 also angry about the dystopian Britain we've sleepwalked into. Revered by Andrew Weatherall as 'the acid house Montaigne' and The Idler as 'Rimbauld on the dole,' Michael Smith has written an endlessly moving book of transcendent beauty about fathers and songs and the pleasures of an introspective life.
Andrew and Michael collaborated live many times and their spoken word mini-album, Unreal City, was released some sixteen years ago in autumn 2013. The project included vinyl and cd versions of ‘Unreal City’ and annotated proofs by Andrew. It was released on Rotters Golf Club and limited to 1,000 copies
https://thequietus.com/culture/books/andrew-weatherall-michael-smith-unreal-city/.
Publisher Lee Brackstone said: ‘Working at the rate of one book each decade since 2006, Michael Smith remains one of the most beguiling and enigmatic writers of his generation. Some twenty years after his much-loved and mythologised debut, Giro Playboy, Strangers on the Shore is an utterly spellbinding work of melancholic reflection and self-lacerating humour from a writer who lives life with a literal commitment to art as vocation and calling. A celebration of the wonder we are capable of feeling when we embrace the reality of not-knowing – part invocation, part howl into the void – Strangers … conjures magic from the abyss that is 21st century Britain and reminds us that true enlightenment (to paraphrase Andrew Weatherall) is only ever discovered on the margins.’
Michael Smith is a writer and filmmaker. The author of two novels and a novella published by Faber (The Giro Playboy, Unreal City, Shorty Loves Wing Wong), his work has also featured in The Guardian, Esquire, and Dazed & Confused. He has written and presented BBC4 documentaries (Citizen Smith, Drivetime) and had a regular slot on BBC2's The Culture Show. Recently, he has focused on directing independent "video-poems" that have screened at places like the Barbican and the NFT. He also collaborated with Andrew Weatherall on a spoken word album of Unreal City. Michael is currently the only person he knows who chooses not to have a mobile phone.
