Back Trouble

Back Trouble

Summary

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

On the brink of forty, newly single with a failed business, Philip thought he had reached an all-time low. . .

It only needed a discarded chip on a South London street to lay him literally flat. So, bedbound and bored, Philip naturally starts to write the story of his life.

But between the mundane catalogue of seaside holidays and bodged DIY, broken relationships and unspoken truths, more surprises are revealed - both comic and touching - than Philip or his family ever bargained for. Maybe there will even be a happy ending.
_____

Praise for Clare Chambers:

'A funny book which slips in some acute and painful observations on the side' The Times

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

'A funny and moving story with a great deal of style!' Daily Express

Reviews

  • A funny and moving story with a great deal of style
    Sunday Telegraph

About the author

Clare Chambers

Clare Chambers was born in south east London in 1966. She 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 further novels, including Learning to Swim (Century 1998) which won the Romantic Novelists' Association best novel award and was adapted as a Radio 4 play, 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 a fiction and non-fiction 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). When her three children were teenagers, inspired by their reading habits, she produced two YA novels, Bright Girls (HarperCollins 2009) and Burning Secrets (HarperCollins 2011).

Her most recent novel is Small Pleasures (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020).

She takes up a post as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent in September 2020.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more