With The Nightingale, I had been kicking the idea around for years. I was frightened to write it because on the surface it seems so different for me.

I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.

Sometimes a story grabs hold of you and won't let go.

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.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

It felt like an oversight to me, something that needed to be corrected. They [women who hid Jewish children] deserved to be understood and remembered.

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