The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

Dunmore is a fine poet who has morphed into an exceptional writer of prose. Some of her novels, in my opinion, don’t come off, but when she is at her best there are few living British novelists who write better. She is especially good at describing wintry northern landscapes and the day-to-day struggles of women in the past. The Greatcoat, her 12th novel and her first ghost story, is set in 1952, near a disused airfield in the East Riding. Isabel is the young wife of a GP, who, it is carefully pointed out, is a much more useful person than she is. There isn’t enough coal or butcher’s meat; she is childless and bored.

One night she finds an old RAF greatcoat in her rented flat and soon afterwards is visited by a young pilot who, we know, has to be dead. His name is Alec, like the stranger in Brief Encounter, and they plunge into an intense relationship which her husband mustn’t know about. Yet in the end we aren’t sure whether she has really had an affair or been dragged into another woman’s memory. Alec was killed in the war and so, we are reminded, were people on the ground.

The final message seems to be that the children Isabel plans to have must be protected from the tragic ghosts. It is beautifully written and will, I guarantee, drag you, too, back some 60 years.

The author will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 28.