I n the summer of 2022, one novel attracted the kind of feverish word-of-mouth popularity that often only comes to debuts. Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers , set in 1950s suburban south London, was an unputdownable story of suppressed desires and longing in small-town lives, with a subplot about a mysterious virgin birth; “almost flawless,” said The Sunday Times . Except Chambers was not an overnight success; Small Pleasures was in fact her ninth novel.
But it gave her career as an author an extraordinary second wind, the book becoming a bestseller that was longlisted for the Women’s Prize . She follows it up this month with Shy Creatures , a tender, absorbing novel set in the 1960s, about an art therapist working at a psychiatric hospital who is consumed by a love affair with an increasingly disappointing married man. As with Chambers’s last novel, the yearning among quotidian days is disrupted by a mystery – this time, the discovery of a mute man with a beard down to his waist, who has been living entirely sheltered from society with an elderly aunt.
And it’s just as good – if not better – than her last. Here she shares an insight into her reading and writing life..
. I have a forbidding TBR pile, casting a reproachful shadow over my desk, mainly comprising proofs I promised to read so long ago that the books are now out in paperback. I’m not very good at saying no – especially to books, because I am mindful that I too am in the business of begging peopl.