Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring: Introduction by John Bayley [Hardcover]

After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world.

 

The Booker Prize-winning novelOffshorelimns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked.Human Voicestakes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain’s heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. InThe Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution.

 

Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

“[Offshore] is an astonishing book. Hardly more than 50,000 words, it is written with a manic economy that makes it seem even shorter, and with a tamped-down force that continually explodes in a series of exactly controlled detonations…A marvellous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous, and graceful.” –The Times(London)

“[Human Voicesis] a wonderful combination of deadpan English comedy and surreal farce.” –A. S. Byatt

“One of the pleasures of reading Penelope Fitzgerald is the unpredictability of her intelligence, which never loses its quality, but springs constant surprises.” –The Times(London)

“Awards are one thing, talent’s another, and Fitzgerald l“W