Offshore /

Another charming, rigorously controlled novel by an English writer who should be more familiar to U.S. readers than she is. This very short work, originally published in Great Britain in 1979, limns the lives of a group of Londoners residing on Thames River barges moored in the borough of Chelsea, an environment with the reputation for being ``artistic.'' Fitzgerald's forte is character building, quickly but resonantly filling in the topography of people's strengths and weaknesses, their individual sense of needs and frustrations and rewards. In this perfectly absorbing little novel, she is completely in her element observing these few individuals in this special community, casting an understanding but humorous light on their special concerns as barge people (leaks, tides, storms, mail delivery), on their interrelations as constituents of a somewhat closed society, and on the personal problems they encounter in trying to arrange their lives. Among Fitzgerald's previous novels is the absolutely enchanting At Freddie's (Booklist 82:108 S 15 85). BH. [CIP] 87-8492

Here is life among the down, out and quirky, housed precariously in barges on the river Thames. ``With economical prose and wonderfully vivid dialogue,'' Booker Prize-winner Fitzgerald ``fashions a wry, fast-moving story whose ambiguous ending is exactly right,'' said PW. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

With her latest effort, The Blue Flower, making many best lists for 1997 as well as winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Fitzgerald has gone from relative obscurity‘in the United States anyway‘to international fame in a matter of weeks. Readers introduced to her through The Blue Flower will no doubt be looking for her earlier works, such as this 1979 Booker Prize-winning novel that follows a bevy of characters living in houseboats on the Thames. Look for Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels (ISBN 0-395-84838-5. pap. $12), also available from Mariner. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A quietly spirited little novel about people living on the edge (and at the end) of things: winner of the Booker Prize when it was published in England in 1979. (Fitzgerald is author of Innocence--1987--and the nonfiction The Knox Brothers--1978.) Nenna James, 32, is center of attention here as she raises her two young and precociously observant daughters aboard the Grace, a derelict barge-cum-houseboat anchored on the tumbledown shore of the Thames at Battersea, London. The time is 1962, and others live around Nenna, on assorted barges of their own, holding together their marginal and sea-touched lives: Willis, the aging marine artist whose barge Dreadnaught sinks; crisp and kindhearted ex-officer of the Royal Navy, Richard Blake, who lives on Lord Jim and whose marriage (like Nenna's) is on the rocks; and Nenna's friend and confidant, the gay prostitute Maurice, whose barge Maurice is used as a depository for stolen goods by a cruel villain who later does passing damage. As for events: Nenna is separated from her husband, who, upon returning from temporary employment in South America, is disapproving and appalled to find Nenna living on the river; he leaves her and the two girls there, removing himself to a far and land-locked corner of London. Nenna's attempt to reawaken his love (she makes a journey to visit him) turns out to succeed, but his slowness of response proves disastrous: by the time he makes his way to Grace to find Nenna and the girls, they've gone ashore, soon to be escorted off to a morally bracing life in Canada by Nenna's proper, well-off, and assertive sister Louise. At the wondrously-done end: a dark storm howls up the Thames, tearing a not-quite deserted barge from its moorings. One thinks of Joyce Cary's Gully Jimson in the tender but unpretentious Nenna, her old-before-their-time but never saccharine daughters, and in the glory-faded poetry of the historic river itself, ""bearded with the white foam of detergents, calling home the twenty-seven lost rivers of London. . ."" In all, a small and very bright treasure. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.