Helen Dunmore Books in Order

Helen Dunmore's first poetry collection introduces the clear, observant style that would mark all her later work. These early poems are rooted in memory, landscape, family life, and the natural world.

An award-winning poetry collection that moves through winter coasts, domestic life, and moments of quiet unease. Dunmore's poems are vivid, tactile, and sharply attentive to weather, bodies, and feeling.

A linked poetry collection shaped by landscape, desire, and the uneasy boundary between cultivated life and wilder forces. These poems feel structured, sensuous, and alert to change.

This new and selected volume gathers early work alongside later poems, tracing Dunmore's recurring themes of memory, weather, family, and the body's vulnerability.

Colette dreams of travelling somewhere exotic, but her summer trip is only to the seaside with her father. Then two boys she meets on the beach make the holiday feel bigger, stranger, and full of possibility.

Paul's family suddenly has money, a huge house, and every sign of success, but none of it feels safe. As strange visitors and half-told stories pile up, he starts to suspect the dream is really a trap.

Sixteen-year-old runaway Nadine thinks her older lover has rescued her, until she sees the trap closing around her. In a decaying city house, survival depends on who she can trust.

A poetry collection preoccupied with physical presence, loss, and the strange persistence of memory. Dunmore writes closely about sensation, change, and what remains after damage.

A children's poetry collection about private fears, hidden feelings, and the secret lives of ordinary days. Dunmore keeps the tone playful, curious, and just a little eerie.

In wartime Cornwall, Clare Coyne is drawn into the orbit of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda as suspicion spreads through the village. Private longing and public fear begin to feed each other.

Abandoned by their parents and raised in an isolated house, Catherine and Rob cling to each other too fiercely. As war approaches, Catherine must confront desire, secrecy, and the grip of the past.

While Josie's class makes a quilt for a city at war, Amina sits alone in a dark flat with shells exploding outside. In a dream, the two girls meet, and Josie begins to understand what war feels like.

Danny loves his computer game hero, Go Fox, until the fox seems ready to leap right out of the screen. Suddenly Danny has a hungry, unruly secret on his hands, and keeping it hidden is not easy.

The birth of Isabel's first child brings her sister Nina back into the house, and old grief quickly turns dangerous. Their shared past, and Nina's affair with Richard, threaten to tear everything open.

Allie, her best friend Misha, and class rival Lin tumble into one more everyday adventure where small school problems suddenly feel huge. It is a warm, funny story about confidence, friendship, and finding your own footing.

A poetry collection alive with animals, instinct, and transformation. Dunmore uses the language of creatures to explore vulnerability, appetite, and the wildness just under the human surface.

Nicky and her friends climb aboard SPACE RANGER, the most thrilling ride in the theme park. But when the system goes wrong, the pretend voyage into space becomes frighteningly real.

When Clyde sees a leopard pacing in its cage at the zoo, he feels an immediate kinship with it. The story follows his fierce wish to set something trapped and angry free.

Rosa feels stuck in a friendship with spiteful, controlling Charmaine. A story from her great-grandma helps her find the courage to make a difficult but important choice.

This short story collection explores love, flesh, family strain, and emotional dependence in a cold, pressured world. The stories are tense, sensual, and alert to pain inside ordinary relationships.

District judge Simone is holding together a strained marriage, two small boys, and mounting debt when a letter from New York arrives. A buried affair resurfaces, turning blackmail into a frighteningly intimate threat.

When a rabbit enters Allie's already busy life, friendship, responsibility, and school politics get tangled together. With Misha beside her, she has to work out what being kind really means.

Tanya is perfectly happy as an only child until a scan reveals that her mother is expecting quadruplets. Her funny, chaotic diary follows the shock of becoming a big sister to four babies at once.

Louise is pulled into the dangerous bond between brothers Paul and Johnnie, a family built on crime, power, and damage. What begins as marriage becomes a long reckoning with loyalty and desire.

A collection of eleven stories that ranges from ghosts and darkness to science fiction and fantasy. Dunmore shifts easily between spooky, funny, and futuristic, always keeping the tension close.

Being away from home gives Allie a chance to test herself without her usual routines and protections. It is a lively, humorous story about independence, mishaps, and growing confidence.

This story collection ranges from Victorian tragedy to contemporary awkwardness, love, birth, and loss. Dunmore moves between tones with ease, but each story carries strong feeling and a sharp sensory life.

Katie is miserable after being dragged to Cornwall by her grieving mother, and she has no wish to befriend Zillah. But Zillah's secrets, anger, and strange glamour prove impossible to ignore.

A generous selected poems volume drawing together work from Dunmore's earlier collections. It is an excellent introduction to her poems of memory, sea, family, landscape, and loss.

A lively children's poetry collection packed with odd words, comic surprises, and strange creatures. These poems are built for reading aloud and enjoying the sound of language.

As Hitler's forces close around Leningrad, the Levin family and their friends face hunger, cold, and fear inside the trapped city. It is a war novel about survival measured one day, and one ration, at a time.

Helen Dunmore retells Andersen's classic with warmth and clarity, following the lonely outcast bird through mockery, exile, and eventual transformation. Robin Bell Corfield's illustrations add extra charm.

Katie and Zillah discover that their village school may be closed and sold off, and they refuse to let it happen quietly. Their campaign grows into a bold rebellion with the whole community watching.

A seasonal anthology of supernatural tales that includes Helen Dunmore's work, mixing Christmas atmosphere with ghostly unease and winter chills.

Rebecca, abandoned as a baby and now grieving as a mother herself, begins searching for the story of her beginnings. Her quest turns into a novel about loss, identity, and the families we piece together.

Katie and Zillah expect a carefree summer of swimming and work at the farm, until new arrivals upset everything. A fresh friendship and a real sense of danger test what the girls mean to each other.

Moved from London to Cornwall, Katie expects nothing good from her new life, least of all Zillah. But the strange girl next door, and the secret around her family, prove impossible to ignore.

Katie and Zillah discover that their village school is under threat, and polite protests will not be enough to save it. Their fight becomes a spirited rebellion rooted in friendship and community.

After their father disappears at sea, Sapphire and Conor are drawn to the beautiful, dangerous underwater world of Ingo. Their search for answers awakens an old link between their family and the Mer.

In 1902 Finland, orphaned Eeva is sent from a country orphanage into service with Dr Thomas Eklund as Russian rule tightens. Love, loyalty, and political resistance begin to pull her in different directions.

Now living away from the cove, Sapphire feels more cut off from land than ever and more pulled toward Ingo. As the sea's power grows darker, she and Conor are called into deeper danger.

These poems dwell on life's briefness and brightness, moving between joy, grief, memory, and the ordinary pleasures that become sharper under the shadow of death.

A War Child anthology for younger readers, Midnight Feast assembles short fiction, extracts, illustrations, and a Jamie Oliver mini-pizza recipe from prominent children’s writers. Its pieces range through fantasy, comedy, mystery, and spooky adventure.

A flood has shaken both Air and Ingo, and a monster is stirring in the ocean depths. Because of her mixed blood, Sapphire may be the one person who can face the Kraken.

In ancient Rome, the poet Catullus falls into a consuming affair with the older, married Clodia Metelli. Dunmore turns their desire, jealousy, and social danger into a vivid historical love story.

Sapphire, Conor, Faro, and Elvira set out on the Crossing of Ingo, a perilous voyage reserved for the strongest young Mer. Sharks and old enemies are waiting, and no human has ever gone so far.

In 1952 Leningrad, doctor Andrei and his wife Anna try to live quietly under Stalin until a secret police officer's child is brought to him. One act of duty pulls the family into a deadly web of fear.

Two turnstones ride the river ferry day after day, puzzling over its endless journeys back and forth. This gentle picture book turns a small bird-watching moment into a story of curiosity and pattern.

In this short story, an ordinary family situation turns tense as fear and loyalty push someone toward a hard choice. Dunmore makes the question of what protection costs feel deeply personal.

A warm seaside picture book that looks at island life through a child's eyes, turning ordinary shores, distance, and discovery into a quiet adventure.

When a savage storm wrecks a ship off the Cornish coast, one sailor vanishes and old sea-lore rises again. Dunmore returns to the world of Ingo in a darker story about storms, family, and what the sea keeps.

Newly married Isabel discovers an RAF greatcoat in her freezing flat near a former bomber station, and one night it begins to feel anything but empty. This ghost story binds desire, war memory, and dread together.

Eleven-year-old Scipio serves as a lady's page until meeting child prodigies Wolfi and Nannerl at a concert changes his future. Dunmore spins a brief historical tale about talent, class, and growing up.

A later poetry collection haunted by time, memory, and the dead who keep returning in the mind. Dunmore mixes everyday detail with deep feeling and historical echoes.

Callum and Amy find a lost sea dragon in a cave by the beach and try to help him through a summer of snacks, games, and seaside wandering. It is a gentle story of friendship and belonging.

Back in Cornwall after the First World War, Daniel is haunted by the trenches and by one intense bond he cannot leave behind. A single lie shapes the rest of his life in this grief-struck historical novel.

In 1960 London, civil servant Simon and his wife Lily are drawn into a Cold War crisis when a stolen file lands in their home. Secrecy, loyalty, and old relationships quickly become matters of survival.

In this short reimagining of Jane Eyre, Grace Poole speaks for Bertha Mason and questions the story readers think they know. Dunmore gives the attic's keeper a sharp, unsettling voice.

In 1792 Bristol, Lizzie marries Diner Tredevant and moves into a grand house shadowed by debt and political unrest. Her marriage tightens into menace in this Gothic historical tale of control and fear.

Written during her final illness, this luminous collection faces mortality without giving up beauty, love, or attention to the physical world. It is intimate, clear, and unsentimental.

The little sea dragon returns for another seaside adventure, where curiosity leads him into trouble and friendship helps him find the way through.

Dunmore's final story collection moves through motherhood, friendship, grief, and new beginnings. The stories are intimate, restless, and alert to the fragile ties that hold ordinary lives together.