The Greatcoat - Couverture souple

There was a man outside the window. An everyday figure, safe as houses, but her heart clenched in fear. It was the look on his face: recognition, a familiarity so deep he didn't have to say a word.

But she'd never seen him before in her life.

It is the winter of 1952, and Isabel Carey is struggling to adjust to the realities of married life in Yorkshire.

Isolated and lonely, she is also intensely cold. And her husband - a doctor - is rarely home.

And then one night she discovers an old RAF greatcoat in the back of a cupboard. She puts it on her bed for warmth - and is startled by a knock at her window.

Outside is a young man. A pilot. And he wants to come in ...

'Taut and elegantly written' Sunday Times

'Atmospheric and accomplished' Woman & Home

'Haunting and exquisitely crafted' Glamour

'A perfect ghost story' Independent on Sunday

'I love ghost stories and this one is hugely atmospheric.' Judy Finnigan

'I really enjoyed the authentic wartime detail in this book.' Richard Madeley

'In her Afterword, Dunmore says that her inspirations for this ghost story were The Turn of the Screw and Tom's Midnight Garden, stories which deal with the past's imprint upon the present. Her own story stands comparison with those illustrious models. A genuinely eerie story in which both the living and the dead are equally real.' Independent on Sunday

'Helen Dunmore's first ever ghost story is at once eloquent and haunting and a beautiful interpretation of the novella.' Stylist

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. 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.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick 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. 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 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’. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.