Clare Chambers, award-winning author of Small Pleasures is back with a new novel. The Guardian has stated that 'Shy Creatures confirms Clare Chambers as one of our most talented writers' and we’re proud to announce that Clare will be joining us for Farsley Lit Fest.

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.

Clare Chambers' first job after university was working for Diana Athill at André 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!

About the Book

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.

Praise for ‘Shy Creatures’

‘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

‘A tender, absorbing novel . . . And it's just as good - if not better - than her last.’ -  Independent

‘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.’ - Johanna Thomas-Corr ― Sunday Times

A selection of Clare