Clare Chambers: Best and worst compliment? ‘My mum loves your books’

The ‘Shy Creatures’ author on what she learnt from Iris Murdoch, the best book she’s read this year, and the bookshop everyone should go to...

Clare Chambers’s 10th novel, ‘Shy Creatures’, is released this month (Orion Publishing)

In 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...

What is on your To Be Read pile? Is it under control or out of hand?

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 people to read my proofs. It’s not very healthy, really.

The best book I’ve read so far this year…

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. It’s a huge house brick of a novel about an assorted group of rangers, cowboys, misfits and outlaws driving a herd of mostly stolen cattle from Texas to Montana, pursued by sheriffs, hostile Comanches, and horse thieves. You can feel the heat and dust and smell the sweat and the hides. The pace never flags over 800-plus pages.

The first book I ever loved obsessively…

I have the ghost of a memory of a picture book called Jorinde and Joringel – an illustrated Grimm’s fairytale – which for some reason I loved above all others and made my mum take out of the library for me over and over again. I wish I could recall the illustrator and why it had such a hold over me.

The book I’d save from a burning building…

I am a terrible coward so it is unlikely that I would ever save anyone or anything from a burning building. However, I have an album of photos of me and my husband, and our growing family, taken every year by the church door where we married. There are now 34 in the collection and the early ones are predigital and irreplaceable. It would be an interesting illustration of changing fashions, if only any of us had had any clue about fashion.

‘The Bell’ by Iris Murdoch taught Clare Chambers important lessons about writing (Getty)

The book that surprised me the most…

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I thought its mystical, other-worldliness would be just the sort of thing I don’t like, but I was ensnared from the start. And then just when I thought I had the measure of its strangeness, my daughter suggested an interpretation that made me see it in a completely different light and shook me to the core.

The author who has taught me the most…

I think the writers we read when we are still young and impressionable teach us the most. The Bell by Iris Murdoch was the first novel I read that wasn’t about either courtship or murder and made me what to be a writer as a matter of urgency.

My favourite place to read…

On the couch at home with my feet up and a cup of tea within reach. In the evening this is just leisure; during the day I call it research.

The book I’ve written that means the most to me personally is…

Small Pleasures, because it changed my fortunes so dramatically after decades of underachieving. Sometimes in the lean hours I wake up in a sweat and wonder how I’d be feeling if it too had failed.

‘Small Pleasures’ became a bestseller and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize (W&N)

The best thing a reader has said to me – and the worst...

The compliment that gives with one hand and takes with the other is: “My mum loves your books.” The response, which I am too polite to say, is: “Mums generally have better taste than their sons.”

Favourite bookshop (and why)?

Village Books in Dulwich – it has great events, a great dog; there’s a patisserie next door, and the owner, Hazel, introduced me to Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny.

Is the book always better than the film?

No. Big books don’t always make the best films – they lose too much in the compression. Some of the best films come from short stories/novellas: Don’t Look Now, Brokeback Mountain, The Shawshank Redemption. I think there is also a tendency to love best what you loved first.

‘Shy Creatures’ is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 29 August