Where to start with Helen Dunmore

British novelist, 1952–2017. Won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 1996.

Best Helen Dunmore book to start with: The Siege (2001), on 3 of the 20 lists it could have made.

The Siege is the Dunmore to read first. It follows a family trying to survive the winter of 1941 in Leningrad under German blockade, and it was shortlisted for the Costa in 2001 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2002. It is gripping and sometimes hard to bear, and the cold and hunger are in every scene.

If you want something shorter and less grim, The Greatcoat is a ghost story set in 1950s England, and quick to read. The Lie, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2015, follows a young man back from the First World War who is hiding something, and it is quiet and absorbing.

A Spell of Winter won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 1996, the first year it was awarded, and it is the one to choose if you like a closed-in, gothic family story. Birdcage Walk was shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2018. It is set in the 1790s, among people who watch the French Revolution from England with hope and fear, and it works best after the others.