3.0
Offshore
ByPublisher Description
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river's tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets.
It is Nenna's domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. The result is one of Fitzgerald's greatest triumphs, a novel the Booker judges deemed "flawless."
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesOffshore Reviews
3.0
“A chunk of the charm of this book is the setting. I bet it would be cool to live on a boat (especially now that I’m obsessing over BTS’s “Swim” MV).
Oh, Nenna, I don’t know how I feel about her character, but she’s only 32 years old with two daughters. I’m 33 and even more stubborn. It’s very hard to judge a character when you compare them to yourself or your own situation.
It’s short, but the dynamic between the neighboring boats and the friendships established among the dwellers is solid.”
About Penelope Fitzgerald
PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both The
and The
. In 1979, her novel
won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for
. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60's, her career was praised as "the best argument ... for a publishing debut made late in life" (
). She told the
Magazine, "In all that time, I could have written books and I didn't. I think you can write at any time of your life." Dinitia Smith, in her
Obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, "I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"
Other books by Penelope Fitzgerald
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