OFFSHORE

Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize-winning 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 good-natured Maurice by occupation a male prostitute by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard an ex-navy 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.