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Home > Fiction and Literature Books > Fiction: general and literary > MODERN & contemporary fiction > Shy Creatures: The ‘extraordinary’ novel about family, love and freedom from the bestselling author of Small Pleasures
Shy Creatures: The ‘extraordinary’ novel about family, love and freedom from the bestselling author of Small Pleasures

Shy Creatures: The ‘extraordinary’ novel about family, love and freedom from the bestselling author of Small Pleasures


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About the Book

'Shy Creatures confirms Clare Chambers as one of our most talented writers' GUARDIAN

'Like entering a modest bungalow and finding yourself in a cathedral' SUNDAY TIMES

Croydon, 1964. Art therapist Helen Hansford is working in a psychiatric hospital, where she has been having passionate but precarious affair with her married colleague, the charismatic Dr Gil Rudden.

Helen's structured life is upended when William Tapping - a silent, thirty-seven-year-old man with a beard down to his waist - arrives the hospital. As Helen helps William express himself through art, she becomes increasingly entangled in his mysterious past.

Inspired by a true story, Shy Creatures is a life-affirming exploration of loneliness, love and the quiet forces that shape our lives, reminding us that freedom can come in unexpected forms.

'Beautiful, tender, moving. Clare Chambers is a genius' INDIA KNIGHT

'A warm, multi-layered mystery brimming with all the same nostalgia, wit and tenderness as Small Pleasures' i PAPER

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Absolutely beautiful - tender, moving, so clever about human beings and human frailty, and about love. It is also laugh out loud funny in places. As with Small Pleasures, the little telling details are brilliantly done. Clare Chambers is a genius Shy Creatures is a magnificent novel, elegantly written, beautifully devised and radiant with treasures to surprise and delight. It is both a compelling mystery about a lonely man with a hidden past and a deeply involving study of human frailty, divided loyalties, and what it means to help someone. Clare Chambers is a writer of formidable skill and this is her best work yet, penned with such intelligence, tenderness and emotional acuity, it took my breath away. I loved it to its bones I adored Shy Creatures and eked out this addictive treat as long as I could and now can only urge anyone with an interest in psychiatry, siblings, Croydon, buried trauma, adultery, the early 60s or simply humanity to seek it out. Once again, Clare Chambers reveals her unflinching grasp of human fallibility and eye for the resonant detail that make the reader care deeply about her characters' fates. A lively, funny, forgiving novel which I bet will do just as well as Small Pleasures 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 Beautiful . . . A rich and tender story of kindness and compassion and the survival of the human spirit against enormous odds A beautiful, immersive, pitch-perfect novel An arresting and cinematic jewel of a novel. I admire the way Chambers writes with such compassion for her characters. She's a true virtuoso of human emotion, and the deftness of her light touch is simply stunning. Small Pleasures was one of my favorite reads of the last few years, and her follow up did not disappoint Shy Creatures confirms Clare Chambers as one of our most talented writers, inhabiting something of the territory of Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor and placing her outside contemporary fashions, although there are echoes of Tessa Hadley and Sarah Waters . . . Chambers's exquisite prose is a consistent pleasure, while the acuity of her observation possesses beauty and universality . . . Dark humour rumbles beneath even her most melancholy evocations; irony and compassion weave through her portraits of repressed lives that finally glimmer with some hope of liberation Reading a Clare Chambers novel can feel like entering a modest bungalow and finding yourself in a cathedral. The low ceilings and cramped passages of her novels, which record the placid lives of mid-century English suburbanites, open into high, mysterious spaces where stories of love and turbulent emotions play out - sometimes in unpredictable ways . . . This is writing of the highest quality. Wise, beautifully measured and as compelling as you want fiction to be A satisfyingly plotted combination of slow-burn mystery and a deftly drawn portrait of an unmarried woman in an era where that was not such an easy thing to be . . . stirring and absorbing Shy Creatures is a warm, multi-layered mystery brimming with all the same nostalgia, wit and tenderness as Small Pleasures, the 2020 novel which made this author so beloved A tender, absorbing novel . . . And it's just as good - if not better - than her last A tender, moving story Another thoughtful and deeply sympathetic performance A captivating story


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9781399602563
  • Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
  • Publisher Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  • Height: 196 mm
  • No of Pages: 400
  • Returnable: Y
  • Sub Title: The ‘extraordinary’ novel about family, love and freedom from the bestselling author of Small Pleasures
  • Width: 126 mm
  • ISBN-10: 139960256X
  • Publisher Date: 05 Jun 2025
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Returnable: Y
  • Spine Width: 34 mm
  • Weight: 328 gr


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