A Dry Spell

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Summary

From the highly-acclaimed author of SMALL PLEASURES - winner of the 2022 British Book Awards Page-Turner

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In 1976 four students took a trip to the desert. Now the repercussions of that fateful summer are coming back to haunt them...

And repercussions are just what Guy doesn't need: his wife, Jane, is moving swiftly from slightly eccentric to downright peculiar, their three-year-old daughter seems set on destroying Jane's sanity, and now even God's gone quiet on him.

As for Nina, she's having enough trouble with her son, James. He's got exams looming, a new girlfriend with pneumatic breasts and now, it seems, he's on drugs. Nina certainly won't welcome any ghosts from the past.

Life isn't going smoothly for anyone. But when Hugo, long-forgotten agent of misfortune, threatens to pay them all a visit, disaster seems unavoidable.
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Praise for Clare Chambers:

'A wonderful novel. I loved it' Nina Stibbe on Small Pleasures

'Gorgeous... If you're looking for something escapist and bittersweet, I could not recommend more' Pandora Sykes on Small Pleasures

'An irresistible novel - wry, perceptive and quietly devastating' Mail on Sunday on Small Pleasures

'Chambers' eye for undemonstrative details achieves a Larkin-esque lucidity' Guardian on Small Pleasures

'An almost flawlessly written tale of genuine, grown-up romantic anguish' Sunday Times on Small Pleasures

About the author

Clare Chambers

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.

Clare began her career as a secretary at the publisher André Deutsch, when Diana Athill was still at the helm. They not only published her first novel, but made her type her own contract. In due course she went on to become an editor there herself, until leaving to raise a family and concentrate on her own writing. Some of the experiences of working for an eccentric, independent publisher in the pre-digital era found their way into her novel The Editor's Wife (Century, 2007).

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.

Her latest novel is Shy Creatures (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2024).

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