The Greatcoat is set in the same postwar era as Helen Dunmore's last novel, The Betrayal, but swaps St Petersburg for a Yorkshire town and its abandoned airbase. Dunmore's fiction has inhabited the 1940s and 50s for a decade now, and what might in less skilled hands feel like "period detail" seems natural here: the poor quality meat still rationed when the young lovers of the war have turned grey, the eking out of coal to last a Yorkshire winter. The heroine Isabel and her husband Philip don't notice Isabel's overcooked steak and kidney pudding and dense cakes, reminding me of AS Byatt's Frederica and Stephanie Potter in the same postwar Yorkshire. Unlike them, however, Isabel is not moving on into the social and culinary experiments of the 60s but gazing back into her wartime childhood and her landlady's unresolved grief for a lost lover.

This is billed as Dunmore's first ghost story, but when I finished reading it  at a stately pace, savouring sentences because they are good and you almost know the ending from the beginning  I wanted to argue with that label. There is a ghost, in that there is someone present to some but not all of the characters after his death, but he is a well-meaning and sympathetic character, attractive to the reader as well as to Isabel; a nice chap who has, as Isabel thinks when she first sees him, got a bit lost. Perhaps the landlady is a better ghost, a Miss Havisham-style figure who is "all grey: grey pinafore, greying hair  seamed face, pursed lips with tiny wrinkles all around them". She paces the floor above Isabel's bed all night, creeps around the young couple's flat while Isabel is out buying their nasty food, and takes an inexplicable interest in the airman's coat hidden at the back of a cupboard. Creepy, yes; malevolent, probably; but the landlady is, technically, alive, and therefore not a ghost.

So The Greatcoat, despite being the first book in Random House's new Hammer imprint ("synonymous with legendary British horror films"), challenges its generic label. There is a sense in which all period or historical fiction is telling ghost stories, populating the reader's present with voices from beyond the grave, calling up characters into a time that isn't theirs. Dunmore has been doing this from the beginning of her career with Zennor in Darkness and then A Spell of Winter and House of Orphans, all novels capable of haunting the reader's mind for years without ever explicitly invoking the supernatural. Her latest work is not a new departure but a development of familiar strengths: drawing us in to a compelling fictional world, populated by characters who live and love with vivid self-awareness. Dunmore has a sharp eye, and a fine pen, for the hairline cracks in a new marriage, for what is not said as passion begins to dwindle.

So the pleasures of this book are not those of the classic ghost story. You won't be scared to turn out the light, nor even particularly alarmed by the way the jacket hanging on your bedroom door seems to be swaying, because you wouldn't mind if Alec, with his "brief, brilliant smile" and "Viking look of men from the far north-east" did come knocking on the window.

The Greatcoat is more reminiscent of classic children's time-travel fiction, Tom's Midnight Garden or Charlotte Sometimes or Alison Uttley's Traveller in Time, than of Poe or MR James. Those books give an innocent generation ways of knowing historical trauma  perhaps the only preparation for the injustices of the present and the future  often using the possessions or dwellings of the dead as the key to time-travel, which is in itself a form of haunting. So too does The Greatcoat. We all know that young men die in war, and that they are brave and skilled and also frightened, and that women's lives are distorted by these deaths. Dunmore's gift, familiar from The Siege and The Betrayal, is to use a finely drawn domestic setting to show the great events of European history on a human scale. She doesn't need "horror" to spook her readers; our past is bad enough.

Sarah Moss's Night Waking is published by Granta.