The knock which comes at the window startles her there is a pilot outside, wanting to come in. One night, when cold, she rummages in a cupboard in their rented flat, and finds an old World War Two greatcoat, which she covers herself with. Protagonist Isabel Carey, married for just two months to her largely absent doctor husband Philip, is ‘struggling to adjust to the realities’ of her new life. The Greatcoat is set in the East Riding of Yorkshire during the winter of 1952, the year and place in which Dunmore herself was born. Lawrence’s experiences in Cornwall in Zennor in Darkness, and children’s books about an underwater land named Ingo, which is peopled by mermaids.

Regardless, one has to admire Dunmore for writing about such a wealth of different time periods and characters, from Second World War Russia in The Siege, to D.H. Reviews from critics have been largely positive – for instance, The Times calls the novel ‘the most elegant flesh-creeper since The Woman in Black‘, and the Independent on Sunday ‘a perfect ghost story’ – but those from readers have been rather mixed. 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, a prolific author, died in June 2017 The Greatcoat was published in 2012. 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.

The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore