I think the recent cluster of WWII novels is so good because we have reached an optimal distance from the war. Just as a lens has its focal length, the novel also has its best distance from the action.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

We must constantly dare ourselves in the small things, until courage becomes a habit of mind that will serve us when we are unexpectedly tested.

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.

However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.