Offshore

by Penelope Fitzgerald, Stephanie Racine, Alan Hollinghurst Narrated by Alan Hollinghurst, Jot Davies

Overview

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE
FEATURED ON BBC'S BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB

Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames, with an introduction from Alan Hollinghurst.

On Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the temporarily lost and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tide of the Thames.

There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, an abandoned wife and mother of two young girls running wild on the muddy foreshore, whose domestic predicament, as it deepens, will draw this disparate community together.

Offshore, a literary masterpiece by Penelope Fitzgerald, is an award-winning fiction that humorously explores the lives of an urban houseboat community. Long-listed for several awards, this top-rated book beautifully intertwines elements of satire and romance.

For fans of Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead), Kate Atkinson (Shrines of Gaiety), Rose Tremain (Absolutely and Forever), William Boyd (The Romantic), and John Banville (Ancient Light).

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review

Almost disreputably enjoyable...You can breathe the air and taste the water.

Barbara Fisher Williamson

Much of ''Offshore'' simply sets the scene and arranges the characters, tasks Ms. Fitzgerald accomplishes with style....These characters are described with great care and skill. Ms. Fitzgerald excels at deft touches of characterization and dialogue....The action of the novel, what there is of it, is crammed into the final 30 pages....No one is settled in the end, including the reader, who hangs on perilously to a slender spar of the storytelling craft. -- New York Times

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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. (May)

Library Journal

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 obscurityin the United States anywayto 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.

Washington Post

"Dazzling."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173563941
Publisher:	HarperCollins UK
Publication date:	12/15/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos