Changes

|title=The Greatcoat

|sort=Greatcoat

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=9780099564935

|pages=208

|publisher=Hammer

|date=February 2012

|website=http://www.helendunmore.com

|summary=Helen Dunmore turns her hand to the ghostly in this short novella set in 1950s post-war Yorkshire.

}}

Set in 1952 in Yorkshire, a young couple move into a rented flat. Philip is the new, young doctor while his new wife Isabel struggles with the isolated life with no friends or family and Philip's frequent absence due to the demands of his job. Things take a turn to the spooky when, waking from under the warmth of the old greatcoat Isabel finds in the flat, she hears a tapping at the window and finds there an RAF pilot, Alec, who appears to know Isabel intimately.

Dunmore effectively captures the haunting feeling of the story but my sense was that we see rather too much of the workings of the story rather than getting a sense that the story develops organically. I could always see the author's hand at work in driving the story forward. This isn't an altogether bad thing when that author is someone of Dunmore's calibre, but I never felt caught up with Isabel's plight although the story itself is compelling and clever. I just felt a bit too distanced from it.

Our thanks to the kind people at Hammer (yes, those very people who brought us the scary films) for inviting us to review this book.

For more ghostly goings on, [[The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger]] is, in my view, as good as you've heard, while for more from this author, it doesn't get much better than [[The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore|The Betrayal]].

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[[Category:Historical Fiction]]

[[Category:Literary Fiction]]