I think The Nightingale is my best, most mature, most moving novel, but maybe that's just because I love these characters. I love the setting.

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

I know I'm not normal in this, but [ Severus ] Snape is absolutely my favorite character in the Harry Potter books. He is completely mortal - good, bad, strong, weak, motivated by hatred, motivated by love. A gorgeous, compelling, complex character who definitely earns a spot at my table.

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

Andrée De Jongh story led me to other stories of women who joined the Resistance in France. I found literally dozens of memoirs written by women who had become spies and couriers and helped to create the escape network. These women were like action-star heroes.

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

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.