Offshore

A community of barge dwellers is moored at Battersea Reach in the early 1960s, holding on to boats that are mostly not seaworthy and to lives that are similarly arranged. Nenna James is a Canadian woman whose husband has gone and who lives on Grace with her daughters Martha and Tilda, twelve and six, who have stopped going to school and who spend the tidal hours scavenging in the mud for Victorian tiles they sell to an antique dealer. Around them are Richard, an ex-naval man whose converted minesweeper is immaculate and who is treated as commodore of a fleet that does not want commanding, Maurice, a kindly male prostitute who allows a criminal acquaintance to store stolen goods in his hold, and Willis, an elderly marine painter trying to sell a boat that is quietly filling with water. Fitzgerald lived on such a barge and it sank, twice. Her novel is very short, funny in a manner so dry it can be missed, and entirely without condescension towards people who have drifted out of the ordinary economy and cannot quite decide whether they went by accident.