Clare Chambers and Andrew Miller talk to Julia Wheeler

The authors introduce their most recent novels. Clare Chambers’ Shy Creatures follows Helen, an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s, who finds her affair with a married doctor beginning to fray after a locked-away man is discovered in a nearby house. Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, also set in the 1960s, looks at a doctor keeping secrets from his pregnant wife and a troubled woman distanced from her farmer husband. When a cold December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.

Chambers’ Small Pleasures was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and won the British Book Award. Miller won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. His novel Pure was a Costa Book of the Year.

They discuss their writing, the ways of the human heart and how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience.