Margaret Drabble: Bernardine Bishop's miraculous achievement

Bernardine Bishop's remarkable novel, Unexpected Lessons in Love, has just been shortlisted for the Costa awards, a fact which has brought much joy to friends, family and a growing number of admirers. It was published in January 2013, and Bernardine died of cancer in July, aged 73, the week in which the paperback appeared.

She is not here to enjoy the continuing afterlife of her work (which will include, we hope, more of the fiction that she wrote in her last, astonishingly creative, year) but, as one of her friends has said, how pleased she would be that we are all so pleased. She had the most generous of spirits, and an intense curiosity about other people: her piercingly attentive blue eyes (and her training as a psychotherapist) elicited confidences and confessions from all she knew. She was a great listener, as well as a great storyteller. Her characters were utterly real to her, and she enjoyed their company; her illness was irradiated by the pure felicity of invention.

And she was brilliant at plot. Plots flowed effortlessly from her, as she rediscovered the talent she had laid aside in her 20s. The story of her own life has been such an adventure. She loved to talk about her work, and, in her company, we all received unexpected and fortifying lessons in dying. This shortlisted novel, written in illness, is full of vitality and happiness – a sort of miracle.