Ebook: 390 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction,
Publisher: August 29, 2024 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Source: My Kindle Library
First Sentence: 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.
Review Quote: 'As compelling as you want fiction to be' SUNDAY TIMES
Favourite Quote: “Already there was between them that invisible thread that joins two people who have noticed each other for the first time.”
Setting: London suburbs 1964
My Opinion:
When I discovered that Clare Chambers, first novel was published in the nineties I was surprised as she is an author I had not read before throughly enjoying Small Pleasures in 2021. 'Shy Creatures' is her first novel since then and has been on my to read list since it was published last year.
With 'Shy Creatures' Clare Chambers has very cleverly taken a true and woven a narrative, with brilliant characters around the event. In the fifties in Bristol a young man was found to have been kept housebound for twenty-five years. The protagonist of this novel William Tapping is based on this man. The story is revealed to the reader backwards from 1964, when William was discovered and admitted to a psychiatric hospital, back to 1938 when William's world was changed for ever. The relationships with the other characters are all very credible with details that felt authentic, if at times harrowing.
A beautifully written and compassionate tale, highly recommended as a five star read.
Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:
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 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 mute, 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.
Previous Review: Small Pleasures
Author Profile:
Clare Chambers was born in1966 in Croydon south east London the daughter of English teachers. At 16 she met her future husband a teacher fourteen years her senior. She studied English at Oxford and spent the year after graduating in New Zealand, with her by then husband where she wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was 25. She has since written eight further novels, including Learning to Swim (Century 1998) which won the Romantic Novelists’ Association best novel award in 1999 and was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and In a Good Light (Century 2004) which was longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize.
Clare began her career as a secretary at the publisher André Deutsch, they not only published her first novel, but made her type her own contract. In due course she went on to become a fiction and non-fiction editor there herself, until leaving to raise a family and concentrate on her own writing. Some of the experiences of working for an eccentric, independent publisher in the pre-digital era found their way into her novel The Editor’s Wife (Century, 2007). When her three children were teenagers, inspired by their reading habits, she produced two YA novels, Bright Girls (HarperCollins 2009) and Burning Secrets (HarperCollins 2011).
She took up a post as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent in September 2020.
She lives with her husband in south east London and generally has her nose in a book.
Photograph and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.