Winner 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. -- Sunday Times.
A marvelous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous, and graceful.
The result is one of Fitzgerald\'s greatest triumphs, a novel the Booker judges deemed flawless.
It is Nenna\'s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns.
Then there is Nenna, a faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets.
And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach.
There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods.
Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society.
Winner 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
