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 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.

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.