Shy Creatures

Books

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 ...