Michael Smith is a creative from northern England who since the 2000s has made his bones in southern England, and drilled into its geography in the process. Until Strangers On The Shore, this meant London, with a previous book (The Giro Playboy) and his part of a music-and-spoken-word album with Andrew Weatherall hovering round a notion of a pre-gentrified Shoreditch, and what was lost when they scrubbed the grot.

Strangers… is a jagged account of moving to St Leonards-On-Sea, a small coastal Sussex town, with his partner and young son, and opening a bar for discerning drinkers – natural wines and the like. Is Smith doing much the same as his old bêtes noires did in/to Shoreditch? He doesn’t seem to dwell on this possibility. The bar holds its own against the various demons which face every hospitality venue in 2020s Britain, until one proves the last financial straw; this is the ending of the book, more or less, but it’s a perversely happy one.

Amidst this struggle to fulfil a modest fantasy, Smith finds time to think, read heavy literature (Greek philosophy, Gurdjieff, Crowley) and parlay it all into this state-of-the-nation-but-mainly-myself address. “I know no-one reads novels any more, if a novel is even what this is,” he says of Strangers…, which really isn’t a novel. Its structure of short chapters add up to something more like a collection of fancy-free lifestyle columns reminiscent of the halcyon days of editorial freedom, large budgets and no culture of being intentionally aggravating for clicks.

Smith is less convincing as a political commentator, which is a relatively minor element of Strangers… but manifests as sort of sub-Marina Hyde summaries of long-settled events whose necessity eludes me. In the main, though, his ellipsis-heavy fulminations sparkle, and induced in me empathy for a life largely unlike my own.