Quite simply, The Nightingale changed my life. It was the first time I tackled straight-up historical fiction, and to be honest, the very idea of that challenge terrified me. When I first stumbled across the stories of the women of the French Resistance, I knew they needed to be shared. So, I waited for someone else to write it.

It took a few years, but finally I gathered my courage and dared to reach out, to be the kind of writer I hadn’t been before. It was several years of work, and a writer never really knows if he or she has quite hit the mark of intention. I’ll never forget a book signing I attended at a Jewish Community Center for the novel. After I had spoken about The Nightingale and was signing copies for readers, an elderly woman walked toward me, held upright by two younger women—her daughter and granddaughter. In halting words, with tears in her eyes, she told me she had lived in France as a girl, during the Occupation, and that for years, her family had asked her to tell them her story, but she’d never been able to find the painful words. “Now, I give them The Nightingale,” she said to me, “and I tell them, this is what it was like.”

The moment has stayed with me. One of the things I learned in researching World War II—and other wars, honestly—is that survivors often don’t want to tell their stories. I think it is crucial to learn from their experiences. It is my great hope with all of my historical novels, but particularly with The Nightingale, that reading them sparks conversations among families. I lost my mother too young, and so much of my family history passed with her. I think that’s why its so important to me to encourage the sharing of stories within a family.
One of the great gifts of fiction is its ability to create empathy. Today, we need that more than ever.

We need to be able to recognize when danger is rising around us and have the tools to stand up, to fight back against injustice, intolerance, bigotry, and hatred. All of it begins with an empathy for others, an understanding of different roads, different lives, different beliefs. We need to accept each other more deeply and care about what we have in common, rather than focusing on what separates us. And when we see injustice, we must fight it. That is really the message of The Nightingale.