Calling all book lovers - it's the latest instalment of the Joanie Book Club! This month, we're sitting down with Clare Chambers, author of Shy Creatures...

Hi Clare! Thanks so much for chatting with us here at Joanie. Let’s start things off with a bit of background, can you tell our readers about yourself?

I was born in Croydon in 1966 and wrote my first novel when I was 23. I have written nine more books since then, but the first of these to be really successful was Small Pleasures, which came out in 2020 after I had been unpublished for ten years and had all but given up writing. It won Pageturner of the Year at the British Book Awards, sold more than 400,000 copies, and completely resurrected my career. I still live in south-east London, with my husband and two of our three adult children.

Shy Creatures tells the story of an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital in 1960s Croydon who decides to unravel the story of an immensely talented mute patient. What inspired you to write this story?

It was inspired by a true story that I came across in a newspaper archive about a man who had been living as a recluse in a house in Bristol for decades, in a squalid state, under the radar of neighbours and the authorities. He was removed to a psychiatric hospital in 1952 and seemed to be making good progress. Sadly, a newspaper report a year later recorded his death by drowning in a nearby river. I became preoccupied by his sad fate and decided to write him a past and a more hopeful future. I moved the story to the 1960s – an interesting period in the history of psychiatry and society – and invented the character of a female art therapist to examine the ways in which expectations of women in the period could also be something of a straitjacket.

Do you have any general tips for aspiring writers? What helps you most when you’re sitting down to start writing?

I can’t really improve on Elmore Leonard’s top writing tip: “Try to leave out the bits that readers tend to skip over.” It’s easy to spot these dull patches when reading other people’s work; less so when it’s your own. My best advice is to stop writing each day at a point where it is going well. This feels counterintuitive, but it will make starting the next day much easier if you haven’t written yourself into a dead end.

We’re avid readers here at Joanie, and there’s nothing we love more than a good book recommendation. Tell us – what’s your favourite EVER book, and what book did you enjoy reading most in the last year?

Oh dear. My favourite EVER book changes from week to week, but David Copperfield never falls far from the top spot. There’s something to make you either laugh or cry on almost every page. I get sent a lot of new books to read, and the one that has impressed me most this year is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It’s a delightful novel, told in letters, about a cantankerous American woman called Sybil van Antwerp who spends her retirement writing to her friends, family and various celebrities. Through these, often hilarious, letters emerges a story of hidden tragedy. It’s beautifully done.

Outside of work, what do you get up to in your spare time?

I spend as much spare time as I can reading, and could win prizes for pottering around, achieving nothing. I also do a little fair-weather gardening, no end of cooking, and can sometimes be tempted out for a pub quiz.

Finally, which Joanie pieces are you loving most right now?

The Celia Birtwell print dresses are gorgeous. You wouldn’t want to hide them away in a wardrobe; they are works of art! And those T-bar shoes are calling me back into heels.

Discover more Joanie Book Club-approved styles in our Book Lovers edit!