San Antonio College Library

Contains forty fiction vignettes based on events that actually took place each time the historic River Thames froze solid. Spanning more than seven centuries, from 1142 to 1895, and illustrated with stunning full-color period art.

"Without the Thames there would be no London. From earliest times, the river supplied the city's needs, as the fierce tides brought ships upstream and carried them down again. Gavin Weightman's book is an introduction to the water and its ways, the buildings that line the banks, and the people who lived by the river, their customs and ancient knowledge. Everything is to be found here: trade and tide, lightermen, watermen and dockers, bridges, funnels...

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics live in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. There is Maurice, a homosexual prostitute; Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man; but most of all there's Nenna, the struggling mother of two wild little girls. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel.