Offshore

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Richard Blake has no difficulty taking decisions, in fact his methodical mental process is described in some detail.

Willis, a naval artist who has never been to sea, is hoping to sell his boat The Dreadnought before she inevitably sinks. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the ‘Book of the Year’. Offshore is the novel of Chelsea Boats – the houseboats moored off the stretch of Cheyne Walk upriver from Battersea Bridge to where the road curves away from the river. The effect is maintained by using correct nautical terms, for example the tide is “making” rather than just coming in.Her characters are - well, they're living in old rotting barges stuck in the mud by the side of the Thames, is what they’re doing. In 2012, The Observer named her final novel, The Blue Flower, as one of "the ten best historical novels".

And as in all those stories found in kids' books, of children having adventures unsupervised by parents (a few of which actually happen in Offshore as well), there are among these grown-ups the scattier people and the sensible ones who look after them.Nenna takes her children to land for the duration of the storm, and the last we read of them is 'Tilda put on her anorak. It is set in the early 1960s and involves a community of disparate people living on boats/barges moored on the Thames at Battersea Reach. Richard Blake is something of an unofficial leader of the community, and his ex-Navy experience grants him good stead. A mile and a half down Green Lanes, half a mile down Nassington (sic) Green Road, one and a half miles the wrong way down Balls Pond Road, two miles down Kingsland Road, and then she was lost”.