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Offshore

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Offshore

By: Penelope Fitzgerald, Stephanie Racine, Alan Hollinghurst - introduction
Narrated by: Jot Davies, Alan Hollinghurst
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About this listen

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.

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

Critic Reviews

"An astonishing book.... Offshore is a marvellous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous and graceful." (Bernard Levin, Sunday Times)
"Perfectly balanced...the novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolour." ( Washington Post)
"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)

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Profile Image for Annie Coulthard

Excellent book but the WORST narration

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!

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Profile Image for David Sanders

A dud

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

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Profile Image for Anonymous User

How to murder good writing

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 .

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