Author Biography

Penelope Fitzgerald was born in December 1916. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford and she worked for the BBC during World War II. She started writing at the age of 60 and was the author of nine novels, three of which - The Bookshop in 1978, The Beginning of Spring in 1988 and The Gate of Angels in1990 - were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. Penelope Fitzgerald died in April 2000 aged 83.

Synopsis

Offshore is set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither…Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all 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 Richard, the ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. Is he sexually attractive because he can fold maps the right way? With this and other questions waiting to be answered, Offshore offers a delightful glimpse of the workings of an eccentric community