Will I love Small Pleasures?

I read this book at the recommendation of a friend in her 80s, and its soft, sure steps delivered me somewhere moving, complex, and unusual. It opens with a newspaper article that has nothing to do with the start of the story and which I’d forgotten about by the end, not that it would matter if I hadn’t.

Another author might have given the same subjects an operatic treatment, but I loved how quietly it spoke. I still think about Jean, years after reading it, and wonder what she found in life after the story ended. 

In late 1950s London, Jean Swinney is a journalist on a local paper, resigned to being given the soft 'women's interest' stories at work, and going home each evening to her crochety, demanding mother.

I worked as a journalist in the 1980s, and even then, the women on the team were often patronised and the men kept the good stories for themselves, so I could absolutely empathise with Jean.

She's far from your classic heroine yet Clare Chambers writes her so beautifully: thoroughly fed up with her lot, yet managing to keep a wry sense of humour and find small… show more.

An unwanted pregnancy of a different kind is at the center of Small Pleasures. When Gretchen Tilbury becomes pregnant with her daughter Margaret, she is absolutely convinced she had a virgin birth. How could it not be? Gretchen was bed-ridden, convalescing in a hospital run by nuns when she was impregnated. In 1957, Margaret is ten-years-old and Gretchen is now married. Journalist Jean Swinney—who herself had an unwanted pregnancy in the past—is assigned to write an article about Gretchen, uncovering once and for all if she had a virgin birth.  A lovely sense of mystery develops as Jean unravels what… show more.

Sometimes sagas can be small in focus and still sweep you away—in this case to a small town in 1950s Kent, and the narrow life of a woman reporter who lives with her mother, a most unpleasant woman, and longs for adventure, which she finds in unexpected ways as she digs deeper into the case of a woman who claims she’s had an immaculate conception. Poignant and bittersweet, Chambers gives an exquisite sense of time and place, with a main character you are desperate to root for, and a sense of impending dread you are almost able to forget as… show more.