Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. 8vo. Published by Collins, London, UK. 1979. 141 pgs. Second Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prizewinning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames and has a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst. On the Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tides of the Thames. There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach. 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. EB; 135 X 30 X 210 millimeters; 141 pages.