Offshore

Offshore is a novel by the English writer Penelope Fitzgerald, published in 1979 and set on the Thames at Battersea Reach.

The book is about people who live on the water because they cannot quite manage the land. Nenna has two children, Martha and Tilda, and a husband who is living elsewhere; she is convinced that he will return, and the novel measures how long she can keep believing it. Maurice, whose barge is called Maurice, listens to her troubles and brings men back from the pub in the evenings, which is how he pays for his mooring, and he stores goods for an acquaintance without asking where they came from. Willis is an elderly marine painter with a boat he is trying to sell and a great deal of knowledge about barges. Fitzgerald writes the river as a place with its own rules, halfway between the shore and the current, and the story is told in short scenes in which people make small decisions that quietly narrow their options.

The novel won the Booker Prize in 1979, and it draws on the years the author spent living on an old sailing barge.