All the more so since I knew that she alone would suffice no matter: for if I finished before the end of the trip, to go back and start again would be a treat. Most people only set foot on a boat for the purpose of pleasure and so imagine life on a barge to be sheer, uninterrupted delight.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. armed at all points against the possible disappointments of her life, conscious of the responsibilities of protecting her mother and sister, worried a the gaps in her education. Described by the Guardian as, ‘one the most distinctive and elegant voices in contemporary British fiction’, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the twentieth-century’s most acclaimed British novelists. It was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years during which she lived on an old Thames sailing barge moored at Battersea Reach. Like other readers, and unaware from my kindle of the brevity of the book, I made the mistake of reading too fast, rather than savour the striking prose and non sequiturs which hit home if you spend a little time on them.I'm well-educated and I've got two children and I can manage pretty well, there's a number of much more essential things I know how to do, but I can't do those ones, and when they come up I feel like weeping myself sick. Writing in 1979, Fitzgerald sets the book in 1962, during the brief flowering of "swinging London," after which everything would change. Fitzgerald's character delineation - drawn in with swift, neat observations and hilarious exchanges really tackles the fundamental differences between male and female. Offshore is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Maurice, a young affable sailor with greater ambitions, is not a good judge of character, and unwittingly lets his friend Harry use his boat for shady dealings.

The river community's life has wealthy, efficient, upper class, generous, decent, chivalrous Richard at its hub, and Nenna is so focussed on her broken marriage that she can barely care for her daughters, who fortunately are more than capable of picking up the slack.Maurice, a male prostitute, and receiver of stolen goods has become particularly good friends with Nenna, who abandoned by her husband is living on the boat Grace with her two daughters Martha and Tilda. In an interview Penelope Fitzgerald said she was drawn to "people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost; people who are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but don't manage to submit to them.