Books by Clare Chambers

With the emotional intelligence of Maggie O'Farrell and the witty observational skills of Kate Atkinson, this is a novel of unexpected second chances set in 1950s England.

This Handbook covers the most urgent, controversial, and important topics in the philosophy of sex. It is both philosophically rigorous and yet accessible to specialists and non-specialists, covering ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language.

'Compassionate and challenging, warmly human and coolly rigorous. . . I am now thinking afresh about how I live in my own body, in a world where, as Clare Chambers argues, nobody's body is ever allowed to be good enough, just as it is' Timandra HarknessWhat would it take for your body to be good enough?The pressure to change our bodies is overwhelming. We strive to defy ageing, build our biceps, cure our disabilities, conceal our quirks. Surrounded by filtered photos and surgically-enhanced features, we must contort our physical selves to prejudiced standards of beauty. Perfection is impossible, and even an acceptable body seems out of reach.In this mind-expanding book, Cambridge philosopher Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key political principle. While defending our right to change our bodies, she argues that the social pressures to modify undermine equality. She shows how the connected ideas of the natural body, the normal body, and the whole body have been used both to disrupt and to maintain social hierarchies - sometimes oppressing, other times liberating. The body becomes a site of political importance: a place where hierarchies of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class are reinforced. Through a thought-provoking analysis of the power dynamics that structure our society, and with examples ranging widely from bodybuilding to breast implants, deafness to male circumcision, Intact stresses that we must break away from the oppressive forces that demand we alter our bodies. Instead, it offers a bold, transformative vision of the human body that is equal without expectation.

In 1976, four students took a trip to the desert. Now the repercussions of the fateful summer are coming back to haunt them. As for Nina, she's having enough trouble with her son, James. But when Hugo, long-forgotten agent of misfortune, threatens to pay them all a visit, disaster seems unavoidable.

Memories she had long chosen to forget begin to resurface. Memories of an eccentric childhood in a large and shabby house, where the children were very much left to fend for themselves within the loose boundaries of their parents' unorthodox values. A chaotic existence peopled by a rich collection of feckless 'guests'.

From the highly-acclaimed author of SMALL PLEASURES - longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021On the brink of forty, newly single with a failed business, Philip thought he'd reached an all-time low. It only needed a discarded chip on a South London street to lay him literally flat.

Abigail Jex never expected to see any of the Radley household again, and thought that she'd banished the ghost of her life with them, and the catastrophe that ended it, but thirteen years later, a chance encounter forces her to acknowledge that the spell is far from broken.