Offshore

Author: Penelope Fitzgerald

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $19.99 AUD
  • : 9780007320967
  • : HarperCollins Publishers Limited
  • : Harper Element
  • :
  • : 0.144
  • : November 2009
  • : 197mm X 130mm
  • :
  • : 24.99
  • : August 2009
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Penelope Fitzgerald
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  • : Paperback
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  • :
  • : English
  • : FIC
  • :
  • : 2016299434
  • : 208
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Barcode 9780007320967
9780007320967

Description

Winner of the Booker Prize


 


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."


 


"A marvelous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous, and graceful." --Sunday Times

Reviews

'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 'She writes 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.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books 'Perfectly balanced!the novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolour.' Washington Post 'Fitzgerald is adept at evoking the atmosphere of late 1960's London with rich period detail' Elizabeth Day, Observer

Author description

Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. Three of her novels, The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the 'Book of the Year'. It won America's National Book Critics' Circle Award, and this helped to introduce her to a wider international readership. She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.