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Clare Chambers

Biography

Clare Chambers

Clare Chambers studied English at Oxford and spent the year after graduating in New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel, UNCERTAIN TERMS, published when she was 25. She has since written eight subsequent novels, including LEARNING TO SWIM, which was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and IN A GOOD LIGHT, which was longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize. She worked as a fiction and nonfiction editor at Andre Deutsch until leaving to raise a family and concentrate on her own writing. She lives with her family in southeast London and generally has her nose in a book.

Clare Chambers

Books by Clare Chambers

by Clare Chambers - Fiction, Historical Fiction

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 40, 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 if 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.