Offshore Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring

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by Penelope Fitzgerald,

Introduction by John Bayley

Everyman's Library: Random House

Due/Published September 2003, 480 pages, cloth

ISBN 1400041252

After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916Ð2000) went on to become one of the most highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. 

The Booker PrizeÐwinning novel Offshore limns the marginal existance 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 Voices takes 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. In The 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.