It’s not easy to do what Helen Dunmore appears to do so effortlessly – write compulsively readable stories about things that really matter.  Exposure, set in London in the early 1960s, draws you right from the first page to its heart:

“It isn’t what you know or don’t know: it’s what you allow yourself to know.  I understand this now.  It turns out that I knew everything.  All the facts were in my head and always had been.  I ignored them, because it was easier.  I didn’t want to make connections”.

Simon Callington, a junior employee at the Admiralty, is married to Lily, a German-born Jewish refugee.  They live a quiet, uneventful, middle-class life with their three young children in north London.  Quiet and uneventful until entrapment and a single moment of unthinking carelessness brings betrayal, disgrace, and imprisonment.

Dunmore chooses the framework of a fairly conventional espionage novel, but only, I suspect, because it suits so well her wider purposes, to explore shifting loyalties, the porous borderland between fidelity and betrayal, appearance and truth.  Her real preoccupation isn’t the traditional tradecraft of spies.  She goes to places more universal than that, into terrain that’s uncomfortable, uncertain, and ambiguous.  She knows that a human life is often an invention, a composite of what we choose to see and what we permit others to see, as well as those more deeply buried parts, covered sometimes in shame, fear, and regret – the pieces that can only be uncovered by love.

Dunmore is a wonderfully insightful writer of clean, precise, beautiful prose.  She has a very loyal following but deserves to be better known.