From the author of bestselling sensation Small Pleasures comes an extraordinary story of love, family and the joy of freedom.
**PRE-ORDER NOW**

'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, multi-layered mystery brimming with all the same nostalgia, wit and tenderness as 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

"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