Art & Creativity Quote by Helen Dunmore

Dunmore doesn’t describe Mourning Ruby as a journey forward so much as an object you have to turn in your hands. That shift matters: a “flat landscape” is the familiar metaphor of fiction-as-territory, inviting the reader to roam, to map, to master. A “box with pictures painted on every face” refuses that easy panoramic confidence. A box is enclosed, intimate, and slightly suspicious; it implies secrecy, containment, the sense that what matters is not the horizon but what’s hidden inside. For a poet, it’s also an image of craft: a made thing, designed, faceted, worked from multiple angles.

The real sleight of hand is the second sentence. Those painted faces aren’t just surfaces; they’re “doors.” Dunmore suggests that style and structure are not decorative but functional, a series of entry points. The “pictures” hint at lyric intensity - scenes that can be apprehended at a glance - while “doors” promise narrative depth. The book will be approached through moments, images, panels of perception, each offering a different access route into grief, memory, and whatever “Ruby” signifies as both person and symbol.

“I hope” is the quiet tell. It’s modest on the surface, but it also acknowledges the risk of this architecture. A multi-faced box can feel fragmented; doors can stay shut if the reader doesn’t consent to open them. Dunmore frames reading as collaboration: the book is built with thresholds, but intimacy is earned, not imposed. In the context of contemporary literary fiction, it’s a manifesto against linear consumption - an invitation to read with attention, to trust that depth is reached not by speed, but by choosing an angle and committing to it.