5 Books by Clare Chambers
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Overview: Clare Chambers was born on 1966 in in Croydon, Surrey, England, UK, daughter of English teachers. She attended a school in Croydon. At 16, she met Peter, her future husband, a teacher 14 years old than her. She read English at Oxford. The marriage moved to New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel. She now lives in Kent with her husband and young family. In 1999, her novel Learning to Swim won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
Genre: Fiction > General/Classics
Back Trouble (1994)
From the highly-acclaimed author of SMALL PLEASURES – longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021
On the brink of forty, newly single with a failed business, Philip thought he’d reached an all-time low.
It only needed a discarded chip on a South London street to lay him literally flat. So, bedbound and bored, Philip naturally starts to write the story of his life.
But between the mundane catalogue of seaside holidays and bodged DIY, broken relationships and unspoken truths, more surprises are revealed, both comic and touching, than Philip or his family ever bargained for. Even, perhaps, a happy ending…
Learning to Swim (1998)
Abigail Jex never expected to see any of the Radley household again.
The Radley’s were extraordinary, captivating creatures transplanted from a bohemian corner of North London to outer suburbia, and the young Abigail found herself drawn into their magic circle: the eccentric Frances, her new best friend; Frances’ mother, the liberated, headstrong Lexi; and of course the brilliant, beautiful Rad.
Abigail thought she’d banished the ghost of her life with them and the catastrophe that ended it, but thirteen years later a chance encounter forces her to acknowledge that the spell is far from broken…
In a Good Light (2004)
Without even noticing, Esther Fairchild has become locked into routine.
Living with her adored brother, Christian, she divides her time between illustrating children’s books, nightly shifts as a waitress, weekly visits to her father and fortnightly meetings with her married lover.
Then one day she encounters a face in the crowd which jolts her out of her mundane existence and makes her question both her life and the past that has helped to shape it. Memories she had long chosen to forget begin to resurface. Memories of an eccentric childhood in a large and shabby house, where the children were left to fend for themselves within the loose boundaries of their parents’ unorthodox values. A chaotic existence peopled by a rich collection of feckless ‘guests’.
And into this shambolic world came Donovan – regularly deposited by his unreliable mother – and Penny, Christian’s girlfriend and Esther’s idol. Until tragedy struck and shattered their joint existence. But now, it seems, their lives are about to become intertwined once more . . .
The Editor’s Wife (2007)
When aspiring novelist Christopher Flinders drops out of university to write his masterpiece (in between shifts as a fish delivery man and builder’s mate), his family is sceptical.
But when he is taken up by the London editor Owen Goddard and his charming wife Diana it seems success is just around the corner. Christopher’s life has so far been rather short of charm – growing up in an unlovely suburb, with unambitious parents and a semi-vagrant brother – and he is captivated by his generous and cultured mentors.
However, on the brink of realising his dream, Christopher makes a desperate misjudgement which results in disaster for all involved. Shattered, he withdraws from London and buries himself in rural Yorkshire, embracing a career and a private life marked by mediocrity.
Twenty years on, a young academic researching into Owen Goddard seeks him out, and Christopher is forced to exhume his past, setting him on a path to a life-changing discovery.
Small Pleasures (2020)
Now available in the US—the dark horse literary novel that has taken Britain by storm! In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion.
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK: Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times Ireland, Daily Express
1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape.
That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life.
Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives… with unimaginable consequences.
Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.
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