Her initial alarm soon fades, and they begin a delicious affair. His name is Alec, and his powerfully haunting presence both disturbs and excites Isabel. And not long afterwards, while her husband is out, she is startled to hear a knock at her window, and to meet for the first time the intense gaze of a young Air Force pilot, handsome, blond and blue-eyed, staring in at her from outside. Once wrapped in the coat she is beset by dreams. One cold winter night, Isabel finds an old RAF greatcoat in the back of a cupboard that she uses to help keep warm. Life is not easy: she feels out-of-place and constantly judged by the people around her, so she spends much of her time alone. As a GP he spends much of his time working, while Isabel tries hard to adjust to the realities of married life. The Greatcoat is set just after World War II, in the summer of 1954, newly wed Isabel Carey arrives in a Yorkshire town with her husband Philip. We had not read a ghost story for a while so everybody was looking forward to this one. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.The ghost story, The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore was book of the month in my book group. 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.