Author: Chambers, Clare

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 5 June 2025 by Orion Publishing Co (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 400 pages
197 x 127 x 23 | 276g

'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 TIMESCroydon, 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