In 1952, Yorkshire newly-weds Isabel and Philip Carey rent a small set of rooms from landlady Mrs Atkinson, who lives upstairs. It also didn’t hurt that it’s pretty short. But, given that I’m always in the market for a spooky tale, I decided to give this a try. Helen Dunmore is certainly an author with literary clout, having been up for various prizes over the years, though not an author I have actually ever read anything by before. Now, I like a good ghost story, and I think they are much maligned by some who don’t consider them to be worthy literature. And as a story about the tedious domestic waste of life for women after the war, Ellen Feldman's Next to Love, published last autumn, is more compelling.The Hammer Horror people recently linked up with Random House to start an imprint of scary books, and the first to be published is The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore. Or sometimes she rides pillion on Alec's motorbike and he drives her to the airfield, where there is a battered mattress in a frosty tin hut, and aircrew nearby still ready the hulking bombers for their never-ending 27th op.Īs an insight into the lives of a Second World War aircraft crew, this novel is easily bettered by AL Kennedy's 2007 Costa Prize-winning Day. To fill the long days when she is not making bad steak and kidney puddings for her sweet, absent husband, she takes long walks to the disused airfield just out of town. Isabel is reminded of lying in her childhood bed, listening to the engines of the Lancaster bombers surging heavily overhead, counting them out and counting them back in again. She has never met Alec, but somehow she knows him completely. In the middle of the night there is a knock at the window, and a haunted man with 'eyes were dark blue, almost navy', becomes a part of her life.

This slight novella does not quite have the scope or the impact of those two unforgettable novels, but as a classic ghost story, it does what it says on the dust jacket. Dunmore's will be the first of these when it is published on 2 February, and it has a lot to live up to.ĭunmore is a novelist, poet and children's author whose books have been shortlisted for almost every big-hitting prize going The Siege (2001) and The Betrayal (2010), about life in Leningrad in the 1940s and 1950s, were compared by reviewers to the work of Tolstoy. The publishing imprint is on a mission to drag the ghost story upmarket by commissioning literary novelists such as Dunmore, Jeanette Winterson and Melvin Burgess to write stories for them. Helen Dunmore recently said that people are 'always very surprised' when she tells them that she has written a novella for Hammer Books.