Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning novel of loneliness & connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames & has a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst On Battersea Reach a mixed bag of the temporarily lost & the patently eccentric live on houseboats rising & falling with the tide of the Thames There is good-natured Maurice by occupation a male prostitute by chance a receiver of stolen goods & Richard an ex-navy man whose boat much like its owner dominates the Reach Then there is Nenna an abandoned wife & mother of two young girls running wild on the muddy foreshore whose domestic predicament as it deepens will draw this disparate community together