Exposure - Couverture souple

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.

"Helen Dunmore delivers a deceptively simple masterpiece, a new take on the lives of the men and –particularly – the women caught up in the cold war ... Exposure is magnificent" (Cole Moreton Independent on Sunday)

"Dunmore packs an impressive amount on to a compact canvas. Full of convincing detail, the novel is as much about sexuality in the age of the Chatterley ban as about Whitehall skulduggery ... A dramatic mix of domesticity and derring-do ... Like many of the best spy novels, Exposure sets out to unsettle Britain’s view of itself." (Sunday Telegraph)

"Under its smooth, naturalistic surfaces, Exposure has a tightly wrought plot gripping as any thriller. But it is the union of this plot with complex, challenging characters that makes the book such a surprising and fulfilling read...will haunt you for months, if not years." (Kate Clanchy Guardian)

"It is an intriguing set-up, and with Dunmore at its helm this tale of divided loyalties never lets up for a minute ... Dunmore is such a class act ... she sticks to the human essentials of her story, does not over-complicate things, and comes up trumps yet again." (Mail on Sunday)

"Hers are expert hands at turning 20th-century history into gripping fiction." (The Times)