Offshore cover art

Offshore

 Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Offshore

By: Penelope Fitzgerald, Alan Hollinghurst - introduction
Narrated by: Jot Davies, Stephanie Racine
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $21.99

Buy Now for $21.99

About this listen

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE
FEATURED ON BBC’S BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB

Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize-winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames, with an 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.

 Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Urban Comedy

Critic Reviews

Praise for Penelope Fitzgerald and Offshore:

‘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

‘Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.’ Sebastian Faulks

‘This Booker prize winner is a slightly dark, witty novel … The brilliant Fitzgerald takes a subtle squint at thwarted love, loneliness and the human need to be necessary’ Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

All stars
Most relevant
Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald is the second novel by one of the best novelists of the 20 century Penelope Fitzgerald. Listen to this and her other 2 novels on audible if you can, then read the others! Blue flower very well read:)

OffShore's quiet tragedy of' the exterminatees'

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I loved this book but was annoyed all the way through by the sing song voice of the narrator and his terrible hammy voices. Please Audible commission a better version!

Excellent book but the WORST narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The reading is very poor and quite peculiar. I don't understand how it could have passed any quality check. Avoid.

A dud

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This beautifully written novel with its finely drawn characters has a delicately wacky tone that is ruined by the heavy-handed reading. The reader sounds like a ham actor, feeling the need to emphasise practically every second word in case we miss the irony .

How to murder good writing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.