[ The Nightingale ]ended up being a huge undertaking - a daunting amount of research on a subject that many people know intimately, a country I had not yet been to when I first started planning the book, an entire war.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I had read a lot of books on World War II, but I didn't know that downed airmen had hiked over the frozen peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains in shoes that didn't fit, in clothes that weren't warm enough, with German and Spanish patrols searching for them.