276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Offshore

£4.495£8.99Clearance
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ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
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About this deal

A young German (ex) aristocrat had "an upbringing designed to carry him through changes of regime and frontier, possible loss of every worldly possession. As the book worked up to an ending which shocks you with its abruptness, but on reflection seems the most appropriate one possible, I began to see how the threads of the story all prove to have a purpose, link and mesh tightly together. Hilary Spurling, one of the judges, later said that the panel was unable to decide between A Bend in the River and Darkness Visible, settling on Offshore as a compromise. 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.

Offshore has the comforting feeling of "a children's book for adults", set in the romantic but grubby world of Thames houseboats, in which everyone is escaping in one way or another from conventional lifestyle, and has "the curious acquired characteristics of the river dwellers, which made them scarcely at home in London’s streets". As they cling to the ladder, Maurice 's anchor is wrenched from the mud, its mooring ropes part, and the boat puts out on the tide. The one whose life we learn the most about is Willis, a retired marine painter who is trying to sell his unseaworthy boat Dreadnought. And since I've read them closely together I can see some similarities - a cast of characters in a specific place that dictates (or allows for) some of the behavior.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. We look at the inhabitants of five neighboring boats and several individuals not living on the boats but closely tied to the boat inhabitants.

I was totally drawn into the atmosphere of the book, and the characters will stay with me for a long time. On seeing Fitzgerald being ‘down in the dumps’, he took her out for a day of fun and frivolity; only a few days later, he walked into the sea and drowned himself. He explains 'My mother is taking your husband in, at considerable inconvenience, as a kind of paying guest' because Gordon knew Edward at school. Most are Thames barges, and there are several rather romantic references to their former lives sailing down the river and along the east coast, both in the author’s own voice and in Tilda’s daydream.Was there not, on the whole of Battersea Reach, a couple, married or unmarried, living together in the ordinary way? To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

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