recipes for the cookshops of the future
Offshore
It's 1961 and London has become another postwar paradise of dull office work, cheap comforts and suburban slumber. But there are always misfits, and in a ragged enclave of Thames River houseboats, they're still making place for the human heart.
That's when Nenna James comes to Battersea Reach, though she finds the good life isn't so easy. A romantic, Nenna feels right at home, but she's also a mother—of two girls who've taken to the shifty river like urchins. And her estranged husband and meddling sister keep warning she's drifting toward danger.
Our script adapts the Booker Prize winning Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, who came to prominence in the late 70s, when at the remarkable age of 60 she published the first of nine novels that won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Bookshop (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in '78) and The Blue Flower (American National Book Critics Award in '98). With the posthumous publication of her short stories, the collecting of her letters (forthcoming) and the translation of several works, interest in Fitzgerald is now even stronger. It seems only a matter of time before filmmakers begin to mine this rich vein—one lovely, short novel after another, each with some distinctive setting, colorful characters, and razor-sharp humor.
Synopsis: When her hapless husband follows work to Panama for a year, Nenna James ends up on a leaky houseboat along a seedy stretch of the Thames, but she soon settles in nicely. Her Battersea neighbors are a motley crew—Maurice, her favorite, does rough nighttime trade in shoreside bars—but it's live and let live on the river, there's place for everyone to follow his heart. If only her sister would take such a view of Nenna's own choices, and her husband, now back from Panama, but refusing to live on a houseboat. Where there's so much disapproval, it's all Nenna can do to keep her maniacal conscience at bay. But there's more trouble ahead: First it's the girls and scandal at school, then complications with a handsome married man and an unexpected visit by, what else, an Austrian prince. When next old Willis' boat goes down and the mob comes after Maurice, Nenna is ready to jump ship. As a great storm sweeps toward the Reach, she sets out for the lost suburb of Stoke-Newington on a mission to save her family. How it all turns out only Penelope Fitzgerald could have imagined.
nyc