“he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.”

English novelist, playwright and short story writer

Kate Atkinson is an English novelist, playwright and short story writer. She is known for fiction that ranges across historical, detective and family novels, and for blending postmodern and magical realist elements into her work. Her debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book Award in 1995. She later won the Costa Book Award for Novel for Life After Life in 2013 and A God in Ruins in 2015. Atkinson is also known for the Jackson Brodie detective novels, which were adapted for BBC One as Case Histories.