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Title details for Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald - Available

Offshore

A Novel

by Penelope Fitzgerald
ebook
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The eccentric residents of a houseboat community along the Thames in London float between loneliness and connection in this Booker Prize–winning novel.
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."
This edition includes a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst.
"Dazzling. The novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolor." —Washington Post
"A small and very bright treasure." —Kirkus Reviews

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 27, 2024

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780547525501

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780547525501
      • File size: 2486 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 30, 1989
      Here is life among the down, out and quirky, housed precariously in barges on the river Thames. ``With economical prose and wonderfully vivid dialogue,'' Booker Prize-winner Fitzgerald ``fashions a wry, fast-moving story whose ambiguous ending is exactly right,'' said PW.

    • Library Journal

      May 1, 1998
      With her latest effort, The Blue Flower, making many best lists for 1997 as well as winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Fitzgerald has gone from relative obscurity--in the United States anyway--to international fame in a matter of weeks. Readers introduced to her through The Blue Flower will no doubt be looking for her earlier works, such as this 1979 Booker Prize-winning novel that follows a bevy of characters living in houseboats on the Thames. Look for Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels (ISBN 0-395-84838-5. pap. $12), also available from Mariner.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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