I simply couldn't walk away from [ The Nightingale].

I have to admit that WWII France was not at all on my radar for Kristin Hannah.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

The women of the French Resistance astounded me. Isabelle and Vianne [from The Nightingale] are my homage to those brave and forgotten women.

I do not often follow my characters off on tangents or change my story on a whim. I have an outline which I follow quite sternly...for a good long while. Then it turns out in some way to be insurmountably wrong and I am forced to re-think every component. Usually at this point I throw hundreds of pages away.

In doing the research, I found myself consumed by a single, overwhelming question, as relevant today as it was seventy years ago: When would I, as a wife and mother, risk my life - and more importantly, my child's life - to save a stranger? That question is at the very heart of The Nightingale. I hope that everyone who reads the novel will ask themselves the question.

I love women being the heroes of the piece. There is just something so dramatic and important about this story [The Nightingale ].