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

The women of the French Resistance astounded me. Isabelle and Vianne [from The Nightingale] are my homage to those brave and forgotten women.

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

I think The Nightingale is my best, most mature, most moving novel, but maybe that's just because I love these characters. I love the setting.

Historical tends to be my bailiwick.

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 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.