Cold Fish Soup

British writer Farrer sifts through amusing anecdotes of his life in a small English seaside town in his witty and introspective debut. After enduring a gauntlet of bullying and quashed romantic dreams in high school, the author moved with his family in 1992 to Withernsea, a coastal resort town distinguished from the others around it by its “crumbling cliffs.” While decrepit and desolate, the coastline—“fragile and perilous, built of soft, vulnerable clay”—occasions moving reflections from Farrer on his own tenuous constitution and lifelong struggles with depression (“crushed under the vice-like pressures of my own dedicated portion of collapsing sky”), the loss of his brother to suicide, and his efforts to reinvent himself as a rock star in college. Punctuating his elegiac narrative are colorful sketches of his family—most memorably his mother, whose burlesque troupe made the semifinals of Britain’s Got Talent in 2015—juxtaposed with Farrer’s vivid evocations of the landscape of his youth: “I’d been told that when the graveyards fell, skeletons appeared on the cliff face, poking out like chunks of hazelnut in a chocolate bar.” Echoing the canny writing of David Sedaris, Farrer has a knack for wringing hilarity from life’s grim moments; however, his sardonic humor occasionally stands in the way of deeper insights. Even still, this meditation on the beauty of impermanence charms. (Oct.)