I loved this stunning collection of short stories from Helen Dunmore. There was a tinge of sadness that this will be her final collection, but we are lucky to have had such a literary talent. Girl, Balancing is also well edited, with the novel being broken down into three section: The Nina Stories, The Present and The Past. A wonderful way to get lost for a few hours. Dunmore excels in historical knowledge and razor sharp observation. The stories are true slices of life.
This very special collection of short stories was gathered by Helen Dunmore’s family in the months following Helen’s death in 2017. Helen’s writing was everywhere, on the computer, on letters to her children, in notebooks, on her ipad, even on her phone. Girl, Balancing is a collection of the very best of those short stories, some fully developed and others partial fragments of what occasionally became novels throughout her career. It is a wonderful insight into the writer’s craft – how one hones plots and develops characters, how Helen’s insight into people and the world surrounding us have always informed her writing. It has been 20 years since Helen published a short story collection and as Helen’s son, Patrick describes in his Introduction, contained within these pages is ‘the pleasure of discovering something new’, even for those familiar with Helen’s novels.
Girl, Balancing
& Other Stories
HELEN DUNMORE
£8.99 Windmill Paperback 7 March 2019
HER FINAL COLLECTION
In this remarkable final volume of short stories, Helen Dunmore explores the fragile ties between passion, familial love, parenthood, friendship and grief often from people who are at turning points in their lives.
With her extraordinary imagination, her gift for making history human, and her talent for acute observation and lyrical storytelling, Dunmore offers a deep insight into the human condition with a collection that will delight and move all her readers.
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’.
Helen was known to be an inspirational and generous author, championing emerging voices and other established authors. She also gave a large amount of her time to supporting literature, independent bookshops all over the UK, and arts organisations across the world. She died in June 2017.