Offshore

Wiinner of the Booker Prize. On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river's tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to another in a motley, yet kindly society. There is Maurice, and Richard, and then there is Nenna, whose domestic predicament draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more ocmplex and comic patterns.