Alec becomes an invaluable part of her life. In the middle of her dreams, she hears a knocking on the window to find a young, handsome Air Force staring in at her from outside the window. Finding a dusty RAF greatcoat, crammed into the back of a tall cupboard, she spreads it over her bed for warmth. Isabelle is lonely, cold and unable to sleep because of her landlady’s relentless pacing in he room above her bedroom. It’s 1952 and although the war finished seven years earlier, food and other essentials are still being rationed. The Greatcoat features a newly married doctor’s wife trying to get used to her new life in an unfamiliar Yorkshire town and a dark, cold flat where the smell of Brussels sprouts is ever present.
I wasn’t blown away by it though I have the feeling that this is far from her best work and I would have done better to pick up The Siege or The Betrayal instead. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.Helen Dunmore is an author whose books I’ve seen around for a long time but never got around to reading until recently when I found a bargain copy of The Greatcoat in a library sale. Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past. Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction.
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