Our brand new British Towns book group meets on the last Monday of every month. This month we'll be reading Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Following on from the Scottish Decades Book Group of last year and the Muriel Spark Reading Group in 2018,in 2020we're branching out geographically with the brand new theme ofBritish and Irish towns! This month we'll be reading Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald.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.
