Menace lurks in the details: the “rubicund butcher whose hands dripped with the tang of blood,” a “bloody packet like a wrapped up heart” in her husband’s pocket, which turns out to be steak, a treat from a patient. This England - cold, inward looking, limited in its joys - exists within living memory, and Dunmore portrays it vividly. Setting off for the shops, “she was a little girl pretending to be her mother.” She senses everyone in town sees her as a foreigner, “too young, too soft, too southern,” the new doctor’s wife. She grimly studies her aunt’s present, Early Days: An Introduction to Housekeeping for the Young Wife, but finds the sectioned cow diagram disgusting. Ingoldby, whose practice he has joined.Ī child of wartime, Isabel lost both her parents in Malayan internment camps she grew up in the house of an overbearing aunt, who “knew everything” (she was on the parish council) but “wrestled every bit of knowledge to herself, and gave it out sparingly, to those who deserved it.” True to his word, he spends days and often nights tending to the patients of Dr. Philip tells his beloved that he intends to work “all the hours God sends”, saving money for a house. Young Isabel Carey and her physician husband Philip, newly married, have set up their first home in a drab East Yorkshire flat.

England still endures rationing, a daily reminder of wartime privations.

Novels like the Orange Prize-winning A Spell of Winter and With Your Crooked Heart create narratives that linger and disturb, so it’s no great surprise that she would try her hand at a ghost story. Helen Dunmore has a well-honed talent for menacing tales.

The greatcoat by helen dunmore