Offshore

Product Information

Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). The book centers on Nenna, a woman whose husband refuses to live on the barge with her and their two daughters. 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.

She habitually moved in a kind of nautical crawl, with her stomach close to the deck, as though close-furled and ready for dirty weather. 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. The book was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years that she had spent living on an old Thames sailing barge named Grace on Battersea Reach. What was praised as brevity, I felt it was a paltry and undeveloped narrative that jumped from one character to the next in a schizophrenic fashion.

To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. Richard invites Nenna for a romantic night-time trip in his dinghy in his characteristic way: '“We could go up under Wandsworth Bridge as far as the Fina Oil Depot and then switch off and drift down with the tide”' Without any discussion they spend the night together. The setting is not exactly like the real-life location: for example, in the book the landmark Chelsea Flour Mills has been replaced by a non-existent brewery, and nobody ever mentions the enchanting sight of Albert Bridge lit up at night. I started at the beginning and started making assumptions, like all Booker Prize winners are about the empire. This is a series of vignettes involving a somewhat close-knit "community" of boat-dwellers and various of their land-living relations/friends/contacts.

I can’t turn over The Times so that the pages lie flat, I can’t fold up a map in the right creases, I can’t draw corks, I can’t drive in nails straight, I can’t. The book is the struggle--the pull of the river vs the cry of others on the land to move away from the water; giving up the dream (or dreaming) for the adult world (reality perhaps).

But the future is not entirely closed off, as there is an implication that Richard will seek Nenna out in Canada next year. There is minimal plot as Nenna tries to reconcile with her husband, and Willis attempts to sell his boat. I was totally drawn into the atmosphere of the book, and the characters will stay with me for a long time. Es una novela corta pero exquisita, cargada de mucha vida, drama, y miseria, contando la vida de un grupo de personas en los años 60, que debido a la falta de acceso a una vivienda tiene que residir en barcos en el muelle de Battersa, una zona industrial en Londres devastada por la guerra , contaminada, y que al principio parece todo muy romántico pero, los habitantes de dichos barcos que se conocen entre ellos por el nombre de los barcos, así tenemos a Lord Jim, Grace, Dreadnought un barco que hace aguas literalmente y Maurice, son todo lo contrario a la imagen que