Like 'The Bookshop,' 'Offshore' deals with an odd environment, felt as both isolated and ephemeral, and located in place and time very precisely and effectively.

'The Bookshop' caught the tone (and the politics) of a 1950s Suffolk village with marvellous acuteness; 'Offshore' treats an even more idiosyncratic community of Battersea Reach houseboat-owners in the early 60s….

The novel evokes with beautiful stylish restraint the whole quality of living moored on the Thames, without degenerating into fictionalised documentary. It is particularly good at the alien relations of river to city. When the characters make excursions on shore, a Conradian distaste is felt for the shoddy, sinister materialism of land life. This isn't allowed to harden into a rigid opposition, but it does produce some splendid bursts of satire … and, carefully anchored to the quiet tone of the whole, some attractive lyric moments….

Individually, the boat-owner's are engaging…. The...