Offshore

Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prizewinning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames and has a new 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 goodnatured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an exnavy 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.