Shy Creatures

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What to expect

From the author of bestselling sensation Small Pleasures comes an extraordinary story of love, family and the joy of freedom.


'Clare Chambers is a genius' INDIA KNIGHT

'Just as good - if not better - than Small Pleasures' INDEPENDENT

'As compelling as you want fiction to be' SUNDAY TIMES

'One of our most talented authors' GUARDIAN

'Extraordinary' FINANCIAL TIMES

It all started the weekend the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park . . .

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 at 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.

'Reading a Clare Chambers novel can feel like entering a modest bungalow and finding yourself in a cathedral' SUNDAY TIMES

'A warm, multilayered mystery with all the charms of Small Pleasures' i PAPER

'A lively, funny, forgiving novel' PATRICK GALE

'Chambers is such a humane writer and this novel is full of exquisite detail' EVENING STANDARD

'A beautiful story of unfolding secrets and unforeseen consequences' HOLLY GRAMAZIO, author of THE HUSBANDS


*Small Pleasures was a Silver Award bestseller according to Nielsen BookScan UK, 10 November 2023

Critics 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
INDIA KNIGHT
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
EMMA STONEX
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
PATRICK GALE
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 beautiful, immersive, pitch-perfect novel
LAURA BARNETT
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
KELLY MULLEN
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
Guardian
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
Sunday Times
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
i Newspaper
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
i Paper, Top Fiction Pick
A tender, absorbing novel . . . And it's just as good - if not better - than her last
Independent
A tender, moving story
RED, The month's best books
Another thoughtful and deeply sympathetic performance
Scottish Daily Mail
A captivating story
Sunday Post

User Reviews

Book 4.5
Narration 4.5
4.0
4.0
Tdk 21/04/2025
5.0
5.0
This is a lovely heartwarming novel on a purely human level but especially so if you are interested in mental health, the 1960s, and how ideas about treatment were beginning to shift at that time. I was sorry to reach the end.
jackdor 05/02/2025

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