OFFSHORE (First edition - third printing - Booker prize winner)
Language: English
Published by Collins, St James's Place, London, 1980
- First Edition
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: Orlando Booksellers, Lincoln, United KingdomOrlando Booksellers
AbeBooks seller since January 11, 2000
Condition: Used - Very good
£ 35.00
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
A third printing of the true first edition of this Booker prize-winning novel. The book was first published in 1979, and was rapidly reprinted when the book won the Booker Prize. ***Very good in grey cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to the spine. The boards are clean with just a small black mark on the spine. Corners sharp. Head and tail of spine slightly creased. Page-block edges foxed - mainly to the top edge. No reading lean to the binding. Spine tight. Internally also very good with no inscriptions. Interior pages clean with just a very few fox spots to some outer margins. No creases or tears. ***In a very good colour-illustrated dustwrapper, which has been price-clipped by the publisher, with a new publisher's printed sticker at £4.95 net. The dustwrapper is complete with no tears or chips, just some light rubbing and creasing to the edges. Slight fading to the sun-sensitive colour on the spine of the dustwrapper, but less than is usually found. There is some foxing to the interior of the dustwrapper. (please see scans). ***216mm x142mm. 141 pages. ***'Penelope Fitzgerald is best known for her family biography "The Knox Brothers", which had the rare distinction of winning unanimous praise from the critics and pleasing a wide readership. Last year her first novel "The Bookshop" was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her new novel is set in the 1960s, among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither. Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can't get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore and in the not altogether savoury streets that fringe the river. She feels drawn to Richard, the correct ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper dominated the Reach. Richard can make things work. Is he sexually attractive because he can fold maps the right way? The novel puts this question, and other ones about truth and kindness'. (Quote taken from the front flap of the dustwrapper) ***Penelope Fitzgerald was born Penelope Mary Knox at the Old Bishop's Palace, Lincoln, the daughter of Edmund Knox, later editor of Punch, and Christina Hicks, daughter of Edward Hicks, the Bishop of Lincoln, and she was one of the first women students at Oxford. (Wiki) ***A third printing of the true first edition, complete in its original dustwrapper. The Booker Prize winner for 1979. A popular Booker winning novel. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.…
Seller Inventory # 9624
- Title
- OFFSHORE (First edition - third printing - Booker prize winner)
- Author
- Penelope Fitzgerald
- Publisher
- Collins, St James's Place, London
- Publication year
- 1980
- Condition
- Very Good
- Dust jacket
- Very Good
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0002216140
- ISBN 13
- 9780002216142
- Illustrator
- Jacket illustration by George Murray
- Edition
- First Edition
- Printing
- Third Printing
- Seller catalogs
- First Editions, Literature
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
At the centre of the novel--winner of the 1979 Booker Prize--are Nenna and her truant six- and 11-year-old daughters. The younger sibling "cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." But the older girl is considerably less blithe. "Small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world's shortcomings," Fitzgerald writes, she "was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha."
Their father is farther afield. Unable to bear the prospect of living on the Grace, he's staying in Stoke Newington, part of London but a lost world to his wife and daughters. Meanwhile, Nenna spends her time going over incidents that seem to have led to her current situation, and the matter of some missing squash racquets becomes of increasing import. Though she is peaceful by nature, experience and poverty are wearing Nenna down. Her confidante Maurice, after a momentary spell of optimism, also returns to his life of little expectation and quiet acceptance: "Tenderly responsive to the self-deceptions of others, he was unfortunately too well able to understand his own."
Penelope Fitzgerald views her creations with deep but wry compassion. Having lived on a barge herself, she offers her expert spin on the dangers, graces and whimsies of river life. Nenna, too, has become a savant, instantly recognizing on one occasion that the mud encasing the family cat is not from the Reach. This "sagacious brute" is almost as complex as his human counterparts, constantly forced to adjust her notions of vermin and authority. Though Stripey is capable of catching and killing very young rats, the older ones chase her. "The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable."
As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the initially bizarre juxtaposition. Adjacent sentences often seem like delightful non sequiturs--until they flash together in an effortless evocation of character, era and human absurdity. Nenna recalls, for instance, how the buds had dropped off the plant her husband rushed to the hospital when Martha was born. She "had never criticized the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival." Tiny comical epiphanies such as these have caused the author to be dubbed a "British miniaturist". Yet the phrase utterly misses the risks Fitzgerald's novellas take, the discoveries they make and the endless pleasures they provide.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Orlando Booksellers
Lincoln, United Kingdom
AbeBooks seller since January 11, 2000
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We specialize in 20th Century literature, and in particular, Modern First Editions. We would be interested in buying such books, whether individual items or collections. We are particularly interested in Bloomsbury writers, Beats & Counter Culture and 20th C photography monographs. Our books can be viewed as a whole on ABE, or by choosing one of a number of catalogues that we have set up for particular interests, such as Crime Fiction & True Crime, Collectable Paperbacks, Children's Literature etc.…
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Modern First Editions, Literature, Literature in Translation, Bloomsbury Group, Counter-culture, Antiquarian, Collectable Paperbacks, Art & PhotographySeller's business information
Orlando Booksellers
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