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 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.

I absolute adore epic journeys that require a protagonist to fight for every victory in the hopes of finding triumph.

The woman who led [downed airmen] was named Andrée De Jongh and her story - one of heroism and peril and astounding courage - became the inspiration for my novel.

There were others, women with stories that were told in a quieter voice: women who hid Jewish children in their homes, putting themselves directly in harm's way to save others. Too many of them paid a terrible, unimaginable price for their heroism. And like so many women in wartime, they were largely forgotten after the war's end.There were no parades for them, very few medals, and almost no mention in the history books.

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.

In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest; they don't lie.