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.

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

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

I love what I call "re-imagining," where I throw everything up in the air and let it fall in a different way. It's not the most efficient way to write a book, but it's how I find the story.

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.

Historical tends to be my bailiwick.

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