‘It’s not easy trying to write your way out of a midlife crisis,’ Michael Smith jokes at one point in Strangers on the Shore. Perhaps this is why he uses so many other devices throughout the book: mathematical notation, occult diagrams, drawings by his young son, a truth table, doodles of the family sausage dog and illustrations of his newly adopted home of St Leonards-on-Sea. This is the scattered debris of Smith’s new life as a father or, as he puts it, a ‘human climbing frame’ living in ‘the dogshit capital of the South Coast’ whose days as a bon vivant in Soho are firmly behind him. While Smith describes Strangers on the Shore as his ‘midlife crisis autotherapy book’ – a running gag – it’s also a charming and often very wise autofictoinal account of fatherhood, one that manages to capture the ambiguous feelings that bubble up after bidding farewell to one’s youth. 

Narrating in the first person, Smith explains that he and his partner moved to ‘this strange seaside town’ after they were priced out of London. In the process of exploring St Leonards before moving there, Smith is struck by its ‘rakish elegance gone rough and dodgy, like a classy old