Strangers on the Shore – embracing middle age and navigating the grief of not realising your life ambitions

Author of The Giro Playboy, Michael Smith has produced part-memoir, part-autofiction in his new title, one of the first books I’ve read to thoroughly address COVID-19, lockdown and the implications. Strangers on the Shore explores the move from (centre of the universe) London, to Hastings, ‘a town full of worn-away dreams,’ as well as becoming a father and the tumultuous feelings that come from abandoning dreams and creative endeavours to accept responsibilities. 

Smith at one point worked behind the bar of Hackney’s The Bricklayer Arms before he gave it up to go after his creative ambitions as a writer and filmmaker. He wrote for ten years (with work also in The Guardian, Esquire and Dazed & Confused, to name a few) before accepting fatherhood and opening a bar of his own on the Hastings seafront. Forever referred to as the ‘drinking town with a fishing problem,’ this town outside of London has many underlying issues; Notably, an unhealthy fascination with occultist Aleister Crowley, who founded the Thelema religion, and who died in a BnB in this town. Strangers on the Shore is an exploration of embracing middle age and navigating the grief of not realising your life ambitions.

This book has heft. It explores lockdown, and the anxiety it caused small business owners that knew not whether they were opening or closing at the hands of the government. It’s a relative title for many mid-life coming to terms with the grief of not living the kind of life they’d once dreamed. 

Michael’s sentences are carefully constructed, though perhaps with a little too much punctuation. It’s possible it’s for an aesthetic purpose though I’d feel more immersed as a stranger on the shore if there was more sparsity here. Repetition reinforces meaning throughout this title, as we as readers are offered a variety of ‘strangers on the shore’ and a great deal of resilience and resistance as we near the end of this book, after hearing about Michael’s health implications from getting long covid. Strangers on the Shore interrogates the long-term effects of the pandemic, and acknowledges all manner of surprises life throws us. Smith’s insular and analytical thinking on this will be insightful to others that have made sacrifices in life, though it’s a commitment at 400 pages. 

Strangers on the Shore is published by White Rabbit on 30^th April