On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics live in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. There is Maurice, a homosexual prostitute; Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man; but most of all there's Nenna, the struggling mother of two wild little girls. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Housed in once-seaworthy barges on the Thames, half-a-dozen irrepressibly quirky people and their collective rat-fearing cat give each otherand the charmed readeradvice and comfort. Chief among them are Richard, whose boat and person are always shipshape, and Nenna, whose aren't, partly because her husband Edward refuses to live on a boat but mainly because she has reached that vulnerable point in her maternal affairs at which she recognizes the superior capability of her 12-year-old daughter Martha. It is Martha who gets supper on the table and calls Tilda, six, down from the mast, where she sits declaiming passages from courtly tales of kings and queens. For all except Richard, who goes to a proper job at nine o'clock every morning, life is so precarious that old Willis, the marine painter, must sell his decrepit boat (at low tide, when the leaks won't be noticed), and young Maurice, Nenna's best friend, must eke out his living as a male prostitute by receiving stolen goods. In short order, matters take several ironic turns that disrupt the carefree, if scrubby, ease of barge life. Fitzgerald, whose Innocence was published to acclaim here last year, won the Booker Prize in 1979 with this earlier novel. With economical prose and wonderfully vivid dialogue, she fashions a wry, fast-moving story whose ambiguous ending is exactly right, although it leaves readers (and one of the characters) hanging. (September 18) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Fitzgerald was red hot in 1998. Not only did her most recent work, The Blue Flower, win top fiction honors at the National Book Critics Circle Awards, but several of her older titles were reprinted. Among them was this 1979 Booker Prize winner, which follows a bevy of characters living in houseboats on the Thames. (Classic Returns, LJ 5/1/98) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

In 1997 Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Blue Flower was named one of the New York Times Book Review's eleven Best Books of the Year. Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize for Offshore, Fitzgerald was also short-listed for the Booker for The Bookshop. The Beginning of Spring, and The Gate of Angels.

Penelope Fitzgerald lives in England.

Penelope Fitzgerald, one of England's most-celebrated contemporary writers, is the author of "The Blue Flower," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize for "Offshore," she was also shortlisted for the Booker for "The Bookshop," "The Beginning of Spring," & "The Gate of Angels." She lives in London.

Admired by many as one of the leading English novelists of her day, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) wrote some twelve books of fiction and nonfiction over the course of her writing career; which began at the age of sixty. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for "The Blue Flower" and the Booker Prize for "Offshore".

She died on April 28, 2000, at the age of eighty-three. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.