Offshore

The greatness of Fitzgerald's third novel (published, like all her others, after she turned 60) lies in its modesty. Its characters live, literally, on the margins, in a small group of leaky barges on the Thames (as Fitzgerald herself once did). Fitzgerald's own time on the water was one of the most desperate in her often-difficult life, but in her novel she's graceful and warmly humorous about calamities large and small, and the tendency of all things to sink or drift away.