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Offshore

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Offshore

By: Penelope Fitzgerald, Alan Hollinghurst - introduction
Narrated by: Jot Davies, Alan Hollinghurst, Stephanie Racine
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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.

©1979 Penelope Fitzgerald; Introduction Alan Hollinghurst 2013; Preface Hermione Lee 2013 (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers Limited Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Urban Comedy

Critic 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
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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'

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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

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The reading is very poor and quite peculiar. I don't understand how it could have passed any quality check. Avoid.

A dud

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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

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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.