“A small disturbance, quickly ironed out”: Helen Dunmore, Burning Bright

I heard small snippets of Burning Bright (1994) when it was serialized on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s: enough to grab my attention but not to give me an overall impression of the book’s shape or a reliable sense of its themes. I vaguely intended to read the novel but I didn’t come across a copy till earlier this year, almost 30 years later. I had bought a copy of another of Dunmore’s novels, The…