Name: Shy Creatures
Price: 31.56 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Clare Chambers
ISBN: 9780063258228

Type

Physical Book

Author

Clare Chambers

Publisher

Mariner Books

Language

English

Pages

400

Format

Hardcover

Weight

0.45 kg.

ISBN13

9780063258228

Synopsis "Shy Creatures"

An alluring literary mystery full of secrets and lies, when an art teacher at a psychiatric hospital in 1960s England finds her life turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious patient who has spent decades living in complete isolation with his elderly aunts in a decrepit Victorian house. Perfect for fans of Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, and Tessa Hadley.In all failed relationships there is a tipping point. It goes unnoticed at the time but can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park...The London suburb of Croydon,1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she's an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor.One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she's admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company. Westbury Park becomes his refuge.When it emerges that William is not only sane but a talented artist, Helen comes to see him as something of a personal project. But as she tries to solve the puzzle of the Hidden Man's past, Helen's own carefully constructed life of secrets begins to unravel...A gorgeously written and life-affirming novel about life's delicate layers of experience and connection, Shy Creatures reveals all the different ways we can be confined...and liberated.

Clare Chambers

(Author)

View Author's Page

Clare Chambers, born in 1966 in Croydon, England, is a British novelist known for her contemporary and romantic fiction works. She studied English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford, and wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms (1992), during a stay in New Zealand. Among her most notable works are Learning to Swim (1998), which won the Best Novel award from the Romantic Novelists' Association, In a Good Light (2004), and The Editor's Wife (2007). She has also ventured into young adult literature with titles like Bright Girls (2009) and Burning Secrets (2011).

Her most recognized novel, Small Pleasures (2020), set in 1950s England, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021 and won the Pageturner Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2022. In 2024, she published Shy Creatures, a novel set in a 1960s psychiatric hospital, which received praise for its prose and emotional depth. Chambers lives in Southeast London with her husband and continues to explore the complexities of British suburban life through her writing.

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