Offshore

The shortest novel to win the Booker Prize, Penelope Fitzgerald offers a delightful glimpse into the workings of the eccentric London community living on houseboats on Battersea Reach.

“A marvellous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous, and graceful.”  -  Sunday Times

A houseboat community rises and falls with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, its members feel as if they belong to neither. Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can’t get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to ex-naval reserve Richard, whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. But is he sexually attractive simply because he can fold maps the right way?

"An astonishing book. Hardly more than 50,000 words, it is written with a manic economy that makes it seem even shorter, and with a tamped-down force that continually explodes in a series of exactly controlled detonations. “Offshore” is a marvellous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous and graceful."  - Bernard Levin, Sunday Times

Penelope Fitzgerald who died in 2000, did not start her literary career until the age of 58 and won the Booker Prize with her third novel, Offshore. Before turning to write, Fitzgerald had known homelessness. She had also taught at various schools and could number both the future Duchess of Cornwall and the Booker Prize-shortlisted Edward St Aubyn among her former pupils.