Лучшие книги Хелен Данмор

Ленинград, 1952 год, по стране прокатилась очередная волна сталинских репрессий. Алексей, талантливый врач-ортопед, работает в детской больнице и специализируется на заболеваниях костей. Впереди у него блестящая карьера. Однако когда в больницу поступает десятилетний сын всесильного наркома Волкова с тяжелейшим диагнозом, Алексей оказывается в сложной ситуации. Его коллеги не желают связываться с опасным пациентом и находят любые предлоги, чтобы отказаться от него, но Алексей как профессионал, дававший клятву Гиппократа, не может оставить маленького Юру без помощи. Обратного пути у доктора нет… Роман знаменитой английской писательницы…

Закончилась Первая мировая война, и рядовой Дэниел Бранвелл вернулся в родной Корнуолл. Парню повезло - он остался в живых, в то время как его лучший друг Фредерик встретил свою смерть на изрытом снарядами поле. Но Бранвел не чувствует себя счастливым. Пока он воевал, мать умерла, а их дом забрали за долги. До бывшего солдата никому нет дела, кроме больной старухи Мэри Паско, которая делится с ним едой и кровом. И каждую ночь призрак погибшего друга встает в ногах его постели, лишая покоя и усугубляя чувство вины. А когда старушка Мэри тоже умирает, Дэниел остается один на один с враждебным ему миром, где легче солгать, чем открыться…

Bestselling author Helen Dunmore's third novel, A Spell of Winter won the 1996 Orange Prize. Catherine and her brother, Rob, don't know why they have been abandoned by their parents. Incarcerated in the enormous country house of their grandfather - 'the man from nowhere' - they create a refuge against their family's dark secrets, and against the outside world as it moves towards the First World War. As time passes, their sibling love deepens and crosses into forbidden territory. But they are not as alone in the house as they believe . . . 'A marvellous novel about forbidden passions and the terrible consequences of thwarted love.…

To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage.

Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore’s tenth and final poetry book, was her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books included Glad of These Times (2007), and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), a comprehensive selection drawing on seven previous collections. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', written shortly before her death and not included in the first printing of Inside the Wave, was added to subsequent printings.

'I wanted us to wake to a kingdom of ice where our breath would turn to icicles as it left our lips, and we would walk through tunnels of snow to the outhouses and find birds fallen dead from the air . . .'

In the years just before World War One, Cathy and her brother Rob find themselves living alone in a decaying English mansion with their distant, stern grandfather. Abandoned by their mother while their distraught father is confined to an asylum, they roam the grounds freely with little understanding of trespass. Lost in their own private world, they seek and find new lines to cross. But they are not so separate from the outside, nor as alone, as they believe . . .

Leningrad, September 1941. German tanks surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged people of Leningrad face shells, starvation, and the Russian winter. Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, THE SIEGE draws us deep into the Levin's family struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter. It is a story about war and the wounds it inflicts on people's lives. It is also a lyrical and deeply moving celebration of love, life and survival.

In her prize-winning first novel, Zennor in Darkness, Helen Dunmore reimagines the plight of D.H. Lawrence and his German wife hiding out in Cornwall during the First World War. Spring, 1917, and war haunts the Cornish coastal village of Zennor: ships are being sunk by U-boats, strangers are treated with suspicion, and newspapers are full of spy stories. Into this turmoil come D. H Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda hoping to escape the war-fever that grips London. They befriend Clare Coyne, a young artist struggling to console her beloved cousin, John William, who is on leave from the trenches and suffering from shell-shock. Yet the dark tide of gossip and innuendo means that Zennor is neither a place of recovery nor of escape . . . 'Helen Dunmore mesmerizes you with her magical pen' Daily Mail 'A beautiful and inspired novel' John le Carré 'Secrets, unspoken words, lies that have the truth wrapped up in them somewhere make Dunmore's stories ripple with menace and suspense' Sunday Times Helen Dunmore has published eleven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphans; Counting the Stars and The Betrayal , which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.

‘Like all great writers who pass too young, her readers will long for the books that might have been but alongside these regrets lies a gratitude for a life spent in literature and the wonderful books that she gave us over a quarter of a century of dedicated and prolific writing.’ – John Boyne

I liked Birdcage Walk, especially late at night, when darkness and the rustle of nocturnal creatures gave an edge to the safety of the paved path.

‘This powerful novel is a fine final flourish from a gifted writer… The power Dunmore gives to lowly female lives is inescapably moving, their stories taking us on a remarkable journey into the visceral heart of the female experience in Georgian Britain.’ – The Times

Helen Dunmore’s pen must have barely rested after her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, was published in 1993. An extraordinarily prolific writer, she won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction for her second novel A Spell of Winter and her other bestselling fiction included the novels The Siege, The Betrayal and Exposure. Birdcage Walk was her last novel. Dunmore also wrote books for children and YA readers, including the novels that form the Ingo Chronicles. She was also an award-winning poet and her final collection, written in the months leading up to her death, Inside the Wave, is both a meditation on mortality and a celebration of life in all its strange and wonderful richness.

A short story by Helen Dunmore from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.In ‘Grace Poole Her Testimony’, Grace Poole defends Bertha Mason and calls the general opinion of Jane Eyre into question.Edited by Tracy Chevalier, the full collection, Reader, I Married Him, brings together some of the finest and most creative voices in fiction today, to celebrate and salute the strength and lasting relevance of Charlotte Brontë’s game-changing novel and its beloved narrator.

In the winter of 1952, Isabel Carey moves to the East Riding of Yorkshire with her husband Philip, a GP. With Philip spending long hours on call, Isabel finds herself isolated and lonely as she strives to adjust to the realities of married life.

Woken by intense cold one night, she discovers an old RAF greatcoat hidden in the back of a cupboard. Sleeping under it for warmth, she starts to dream. And not long afterwards, while her husband is out, she is startled by a knock at her window.

Outside is a young RAF pilot, waiting to come in.

His name is Alec, and his powerful presence both disturbs and excites her. Her initial alarm soon fades, and they begin an intense affair. But nothing has prepared her for the truth about Alec's life, nor the impact it will have on hers ...

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF INSIDE THE WAVE, THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017**

Rebecca was abandoned by her mother in a shoebox in the backyard of an Italian restaurant when she was two days old. Her life begins without history, in the dark outdoors. Who is she, where has she come from and what can she become? Thirty years later, married to Adam, she gives birth to Ruby, and to a new life for herself. But when sudden tragedy changed the course of that life for ever, and all the lives that touch hers, Rebecca is out in the world again, searching . . .

Sapphy and her brother Conor have been called to take part in an ancient and dangerous coming-of-age ritual, but Ervys and his followers are determined to stop them.

Sapphire lives in two worlds. On land she walks the rocky shores of the Cornwall coast—but under the sea she can swim like a seal by the side of her Mer friend Faro.

Now both of Sapphy's worlds are threatened. In the profound depths of the ocean, where the Mer cannot go, a monster called the Kraken is stirring. He has the power to sweep Ingo away and shake the land from its foundation.

Because of her mixed blood, Sapphire can enter the Deep. With a great whale as her guide, she will journey to a place so far from the sun, no light can find it—and confront an evil that's even darker.

Counting the Stars is a captivating tale of forbidden love and bestselling author Helen Dunmore's tenth novel.

In the heat of Rome's long summer, the poet Catullus and his older married lover, Clodia Metelli, meet in secret.

Living at the heart of sophisticated, brittle and brutal Roman society at the time of Pompey, Crassus and Julius Caesar, Catullus is obsessed with Clodia, the Lesbia of his most passionate poems. He is jealous of her husband, of her maid, even of her pet sparrow. And Clodia? Catullus is 'her dear poet', but possibly not her only interest . . .

Their Rome is a city of extremes. Tenants are packed into ramshackle apartment blocks while palatial villas house the magnificence of the families who control Rome. Armed street gangs clash in struggles for political power. Slaves are the eyes and ears of everything that goes on, while civilization and violence are equals, murder is the easy option and poison the weapon of choice.

Catallus' relationship with Clodia is one of the most intense, passionate, tormented and candid in history. In love and in hate, their story exposes the beauty and terrors of Roman life in the late Republic.

'She reels you in . . . Dunmore has a gift for turning every genre she touches to gold' Telegraph

`Dunmore at her most innovative and daring . . . a powerful and convincing study of fame and notoriety . . . captivating and compelling' Time Out

'Dunmore's strengths as a novelist have always included her skill in sensuous description and her ability to convey the promises and the dangers of erotic love. The Rome she has so vividly realised in Counting the Stars provides a new stage on which to display those strengths' Sunday Times

Helen Dunmore is the author of twelve novels: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphans; Counting the Stars; The Betrayal, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010, and The Greatcoat. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.

A whisper on the tide

Sapphire's father mysteriously vanishes into the waves off the Cornwall coast where her family has always lived. She misses him terribly, and she longs to hear his spellbinding tales about the Mer, who live in the underwater kingdom of Ingo. Perhaps that is why she imagines herself being pulled like a magnet toward the sea. But when her brother, Conor, starts disappearing for hours on end, Sapphy starts to believe she might not be the only one who hears the call of the ocean.

In a novel full of longing, mystery, and magic, Helen Dunmore takes us to a new world that has the power both to captivate and to destroy.

Finland, 1902, and the Russian Empire enforces a brutal policy to destroy Finland's freedom and force its people into submission.

Eeva, orphaned daughter of a failed revolutionary, also battles to find her independence and identity. Destitute when her father dies, she is sent away to a country orphanage, and then employed as servant to a widowed doctor, Thomas Eklund. Slowly, Thomas falls in love with Eeva . . . but she has committed herself long ago to a boy from her childhood, Lauri, who is now caught up in Helsinki's turmoil of resistance to Russian rule.

Set in dangerous, unfamiliar times which strangely echo our own, the story reveals how terrorism lies hidden within ordinary life, as rulers struggle to hold on to power. House of Orphans is a rich, brilliant story of love, history and change.

In a seaside town of sandy beaches and ocean breezes, Sapphy has never felt so far from the sea. The crowded shore at St. Pirans is nothing like the cove at Sapphy's old home, where she first found her way into the underwater world of Ingo.
But Ingo's pull is strong, and it always finds a way. Soon Sapphy and her brother, Conor, are swimming beneath the waves again, riding the currents and teasing their Mer friend Faro. As Sapphy goes deeper into Ingo, she learns to feel more at home in the sea - even as she begins to be aware of its dangers.
There's the danger of going in too deep, and breaking the delicate balance between Sapphy's life on land and her life in Ingo. There's the mysterious disappearance of Sapphy's father, an experienced sailor who should never have drowned. And then there's Ingo itself - a restless power as old as the world, as strong as the tides, and more dangerous than anything Sapphy has ever known.

An intriguing situation, seamless pacing, a rising sense of menace and a surprise ending bring Dunmore's new novel (after the well-received Talking to the Dead) into the winner's circle. British district judge Simone struggles as the family breadwinner, while her unemployed husband faces bankruptcy and takes care of their two boys. Keeping the family together in their remote seaside village is hard enough, but Simone's fragile worldAalso undermined by a childhood traumaAis threatened by the intrusion of her long-buried past. Michael, an American Vietnam veteran whom she met during a summer in the States, sends her an intense letter and copies of several photographs of them nude together. Then he arrives in her village, having decided to reconnect with the one person whose image he has nurtured over two decades, some of which was spent in a mental hospital. Dunmore intricately weaves past and present, bringing the experimental atmosphere of the 1970s to life as Simone reads Michael's letters and views the incriminating photographs taken by his war buddy, Calvin, whom she remembers as a constant unsettling presence. The indelible impression of a first true love contrasts with Simone's fierce desire to protect her family from what seems to be a blackmail plot. The novel's marsh-country setting, where bogs can swallow people whole, is a fearsome metaphor for a life abundant with insecurity and tension. This is a provocative tale, candid about the way past deeds and encounters can endanger present lives, casting shadows that can't be erased.

Morveren lives with her parents and twin sister Jenna on an island off the coast of Cornwall - an island that in the long distant past was devastated by a tidal wave, its halls and people lost. Only some of those taken by the sea may not have been lost at all! Now, as Morveren and Jenna's relationship shifts and changes, like driftwood on the tide, Morveren finds a beautiful teenage boy in a rock pool after a storm. Going to his rescue, she is shocked to see that he is not human but a Mer boy. With Jenna refusing to face the truth, Morveren finds herself alone at the worst possible time. Because when the worlds of Air and Mer meet, the consequences can be terrible!

A deceptively simple masterpiece' Independent on Sunday
'Will haunt you for months, if not years' Guardian
'Outstanding ... if you only buy one book, make it this one' Good Housekeeping
The Cold War is at its height, and a spy may be a friend or neighbour, colleague or lover.
At the end of a suburban garden, in the pouring rain, a woman buries a briefcase deep in the earth.
She believes that she is protecting her family.
What she will learn is that no one is immune from betrayal or the devastating consequences of exposure.
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