Inside the Wave

Winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2017Winner of the 2017 Costa Book Awards Poetry Award To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. 'We all felt this is a modern classic; a fantastic collection, life affirming and uplifting. The poems carry powerful messages that speak to all of us.' - Wendy Holden, Chair of the final Costa Book Awards judgesThese poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead - the underworld and the human living world - and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Inside the Wave was Helen Dunmore's final collection, following The Malarkey (2012), whose title poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books include Glad of These Times (2007), and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), a comprehensive selection drawing on seven previous collections. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', was written shortly before her death and not included in the first edition of Inside the Wave; this revised edition includes that work. Helen Dunmore’s pen must have barely rested after her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, was published in 1993. An extraordinarily prolific writer, she won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction for her second novel A Spell of Winter and her other bestselling fiction included the novels The Siege, The Betrayal and Exposure. Birdcage Walk was her last novel. Dunmore also wrote books for children and YA readers, including the novels that form the Ingo Chronicles. She was also an award-winning poet and her final collection, written in the months leading up to her death, Inside the Wave, is both a meditation on mortality and a celebration of life in all its strange and wonderful richness.