Shy Creatures

In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Hilary Mantel, and Ann Patchett—an extraordinary, keenly observed period piece about secrets and lies set in postwar Britain, when an art teacher at a psychiatric hospital finds her life turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious patient who has spent decades living in complete isolation with his elderly aunts in a decrepit Victorian house.

In all failed relationships there is a tipping point. It goes unnoticed at the time but can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park…

The London suburb of Croydon,1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she’s an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor.

One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she’s admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company. Westbury Park becomes his refuge.

When it emerges that William is not only sane but a talented artist, Helen comes to see him as something of a personal project. But as she tries to solve the puzzle of the Hidden Man’s past, Helen’s own carefully constructed life of secrets begins to unravel...

A gorgeously written and life-affirming novel about life’s delicate layers of experience and connection, Shy Creatures reveals all the different ways we can be confined...and liberated.