'This traffic between the everyday and mortality requires a perfect control of tone, neither sententious nor sentimental in this familiar setting... In its uninsistent but authoritative way, The Malarkey is a condition-of-England book, driven by a concern for those who have little purchase on their own lives... The Malarkey is Helen Dunmore's best collection, the work of a grown-up for grown-ups who will remember what in the nature of things they've had to lose and what nevertheless they seek to celebrate' - Sean O'Brien, Guardian; 'What is wonderful is the unusual way her steadiness as a writer serves as a foil to the mysterious. She prefers to show, not tell...The passing of time is crucial in this collection and especially its most violent trick of making years disappear in a moment...a collection filled with extraordinary, incorporeal moments and with vanishing acts...The personal poems are superb and anything but self-indulgent' - Kate Kellaway, The Observer; 'Her latest collection is a clear-eyed, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, meditation on time past and people lost...a superbly structured collection in which poems echo and answer each other' - Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday.