Offshore

A black and white photo of old house boats on the water.

The Innocents Ashore: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore Turns Forty

ByBailey Trela

Forty years ago, a little-known British writer published a slim volume that went on, miraculously, to win the Booker Prize. Its lucid, almost stringent prose, coupled with its curious subject matter—the lives of houseboat dwellers living on the Thames—brought the work of Penelope Fitzgerald to wide attention.

On Building Believable Characters in Fiction
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On Building Believable Characters in Fiction

Bylaurajeanschneider

Before I picked up a copy of Offshore last month, it had been years since I read Penelope Fitzgerald, a British author who didn’t start writing until she was in her sixties. But the characters in this Booker Prize-winning novel caught my attention and I soon became completely emerged in Fitzgerald’s cleverly constructed world. Set…