A mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago in a heart-aching new novel from the author of the award-winning Golden Child, and a life-affirming exploration of love, loneliness and the quiet forces that shape our lives from the author of bestselling sensation Small Pleasures.
Join us with Claire Adam and Clare Chambers to discuss their latest novels, Love Forms and Shy Creatures.
LOVE FORMS
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption.Dawn tries to carry on with her life - a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce - but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been.Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn's long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?
SHY CREATURES
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 the hospital. As Helen helps William express himself through art, she becomes increasingly entangled in his mysterious past.
Claire Adam, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, studied Physics in the US, and later took an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first novel, Golden Child, was published in 2019 by Faber (UK) and SJP for Hogarth (USA), and in translation. It featured on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’ and was named one of BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Changed the World’. It was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the McKitterick Prize and was named as a ‘Book of the Year’ by the Evening Standard and The Times.
Clare Chambers was born in south east London in 1966. Her first novel, Uncertain Terms, was published when she was 25. She has since written nine further novels, including Learning to Swim (Century 1998) which won the Romantic Novelists' Association best novel award and In a Good Light (Century 2004) which was longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize. Small Pleasures (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) was her first novel in a decade and became a word-of-mouth hit. It was selected for BBC2 Between the Covers, and was chosen as a book of the year by The Times, the Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, and Spectator among others. It went on to win Pageturner of the Year at the British Book Awards and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
