Offshore: A Novel

by Penelope Fitzgerald

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547525501
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	336,797
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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 New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. 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" (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York Times 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 New York Times 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?"

Date of Birth:

December 17, 1916

Date of Death:

May 3, 2000

Place of Birth:

Lincoln, England

Place of Death:

London, England

Education:

Somerville College, Oxford University, 1939

What People are Saying About This

Frank Kermode

The kind of fiction in which perfection is almost to be hoped for, unostentatious as true virtuosity can make it, its texture a pure pleasure.

Editorial Reviews

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

Barbara Fisher Williamson

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

New York Times Book Review

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)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal

"Dazzling."

Washington Post