Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

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.

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

[ 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.

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

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