Shy Creatures

(Hardback)

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PREORDER SHY CREATURES: the masterful new novel from Clare Chambers about love, family and the joy of freedom

Coming August 2024

In all failed relationships there is a point that passes unnoticed at the time, which can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park.

Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with Gil: a charismatic, married doctor.

One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen's home. A thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.

Shy Creatures is a life-affirming novel about all the different ways we can be confined, how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience, the joy of freedom and the transformative power of kindness.

Reviews

Shy Creatures reads easily and delightfully and yet is rich with emotional truth, and completely absorbing. I loved it, and didn't want it to end * LISSA EVANS *
beautiful . . . A rich and tender story of kindness and compassion and the survival of the human spirit against enormous odds * RUTH HOGAN *
A very fine book . . . It's witty and sharp and reads like something by Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner, without ever feeling like a pastiche * DAVID NICHOLLS (about SMALL PLEASURES) *
An almost flawlessly written tale of genuine, grown-up romantic anguish. Written in prose that is clipped as closely as suburban hedges * SUNDAY TIMES (about SMALL PLEASURES) *
Beautiful * Jessie Burton, about SMALL PLEASURES *

Author Bio

Clare Chambers's first job after university was working for Diana Athill at Andre Deutsch. Her first novel Uncertain Terms was published in 1992 and she is the author of eight other novels.

Small Pleasures, her first work of fiction in ten years, became a word-of-mouth hit on publication, was selected for BBC 2 Between the Covers book club and for BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, and was selected as a Book of the Year by The Times, the Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, Spectator, Metro, Red and Good Housekeeping. It also won Pageturner of the Year Award at the British Book Awards 2022 and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021.