From the Library With Love

Send us a textDuring the Second World War, Ruth Brook escaped Nazi persecution in Germany and followed her wartime sweetheart, a Lancaster Bomber into the RAF. As a WAAF, she quickly found a sense of her own purpose. Ruth was offered a job as a cook, a typist or a flight mechanic. She picked up a spanner and her life began. From welding to hydraulics, WW2 was a intense training ground for a young woman starting out in life. In her 101 years Ruth has packed a lot in. From working as a flight mechanic to a post-war publisher, and then a psychotherapist, Ruth has  lived a life rich with adventure. I was lucky enough to meet this extraordinary woman in her London home.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textFormer policewoman and district nurse turned novelist, Jean Fullerton has written over 20 novels but recently published something a bit closer to home, her memoir, A Child of the East End. In conversation at the Write Idea Festival, Jean shared eye-watering stories of her childhood in Wapping, the curse of family secrets, bum-stamping and sexism in the police force and why we romanticise the past, Jean proves there is no such thing as a ordinary life. I started by asking her what made her bare her soul in the pages of a book…Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textIn the 19th century it was surprisingly easy for a woman to be consigned to the  misery of an asylum. Many in fact weren't actually mentally ill. Husband tired of his wife? A woman who bore an illegitimate child? A woman who didn't want to marry the man her parents had chosen for her? Or anyone, in short, who didn't conform to the narrow standards of society.Once a woman was incarcerated, it was almost impossible to get out of a place often described as 'death traps'.Author Louisa Treger came across the astonishing true story of investigative journalist Nellie Bly, who intentionally got herself committed to an asylum in order to write a blistering expose and lift the lid on conditions. She was 'instantly hooked and intrigued' as she told me in this fascinating conversation.Louisa also discusses her fascinating new novel, The Paris Muse, a fictionalized retelling of the disturbing love story between talented French photographer Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso. Louisa shares her motivation behind ensuring this talented woman is no longer a footnote and how she breathed life into this extraordinary love affair.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textHistorical fiction author Kristy Cambron wears a lot of hats. She's a Christy Award-winning author of historical fiction, including her bestselling novels, THE BUTTERFLY AND THE VIOLIN and THE PARIS DRESSMAKER, as well as nonfiction titles. She also serves as Vice President and literary agent with Gardner Literary, where she was named ACFW Agent of the Year in 2024.Kristy squeezed in time to chat with me about our shared love of research and forgotten stories from the past. Her latest novel is a must read for those who can't resist a wartime tale and a dusty second-hand bookshop!Inspired by real accounts of the Forgotten Blitz bombings, The British Booksellers highlights the courage of those whose lives were forever changed by war—and the stories that bind us in the fight for what matters most.A tenant farmer's son had no business daring to dream of a future with an earl's daughter, but that couldn't keep Amos Darby from his secret friendship with Charlotte Terrington . . . until the reality of the Great War sobered youthful dreams. Now decades later, he bears the brutal scars of battles fought in the trenches and their futures that were stolen away. His return home doesn't come with tender reunions, but with the hollow fulfillment of opening a bookshop on his own and retreating as a recluse within its walls.When the future Earl of Harcourt chose Charlotte to be his wife, she knew she was destined for a loveless match. Though her heart had chosen another long ago, she pledges her future even as her husband goes to war. Twenty-five years later, Charlotte remains a war widow who divides her days between her late husband's declining estate and operating a quaint Coventry bookshop—Eden Books, lovingly named after her grown daughter. And Amos is nothing more than the rival bookseller across the lane.As war with Hitler looms, Eden is determined to preserve her father's legacy. So when an American solicitor arrives threatening a lawsuit that could destroy everything they've worked so hard to preserve, mother and daughter prepare to fight back. But with devastation wrought by the Luftwaffe's local blitz terrorizing the skies, battling bookshops—and lost loves, Amos and Charlotte—must put aside their differences and fight together to help Coventry survive.From deep in the trenches of the Great War to the storied English countryside and the devastating Coventry Blitz of WWII, The British Booksellers explores the unbreakable bonds that unite us through love, loss, and the enduring solace that can be found between the pages of a book.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textNeil Barclay is an award-winning civilian librarian at HMP Thameside. Nominated by prisoners, and described by his colleagues as “our library superstar”, Neil has been praised for the outstanding dedication, skill and creativity he has shown in transforming the prison's library into a dynamic learning and resource centre, much valued by prisoners and staff, and described as “the envy of other prisons”. Here he shares with us his passionate belief that books and reading have the power to rehabilitate and transform prisoners lives.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textRachel Hore is the multi-million selling Sunday Times author of thirteen novels with her fourteenth, Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge, coming out next year.Rachel is an avid reader. 'My reading addiction got properly under way when I was five and our family moved from Surrey, England, where I was born, to live in Hong Kong because of my father's job. I loved Hong Kong, but I also missed home, and one of the great excitements was receiving parcels of books from relatives in the UK. When the tropical heat got to me, which it often did, being red-haired with fair skin, I'd lie on my bed and lose myself in Enid Blyton, Black Beauty or the Chronicles of Narnia.'Her love for tales about the past was born from reading books by historical authors like Cynthia Harnett, Hilda Lewis and Rosemary Sutcliff. 'During my early teenage years I perused Jackie magazine and longed for romance, but instead fell in love with English literature. I tried Jane Austen and the Brontës, raided my grandfather's bookshelf for Dickens and my local library for Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Wilkie Collins. I owe a huge debt to the public library system and believe passionately that we should maintain it for future generations.'In this conversation, Rachel and I talk about her latest book, the craft of writing and the mysterious photo which triggered her journey into Cornwall's wartime pastYou can learn more about Rachel and her wonderful books, here Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textDonna Jones Alward is prolific author, writing over sixty novels. Here she explains why her first historical fiction novel, When the World Fell Silent, challenged her to grapple with a dark chapter in Canada's history...When the World Fell SilentA Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestseller1917. Halifax, Nova ScotiaNora Crowell wants more than her sister's life as a wife and mother. As WWI rages across the Atlantic, she becomes a lieutenant in the Canadian Army Nursing Corp. But trouble is looming and it won't be long before the truth comes to light.Having lost her beloved husband in the trenches and with no-one else to turn to, Charlotte Campbell now lives with his haughty relations who treat her like the help. It is baby Aileen, the joy and light of her life, who spurs her to dream of a better life.When tragedy strikes in Halifax Harbour, nothing for these two women will ever be the same again. Their paths will cross in the most unexpected way, trailing both heartbreak and joy its wake…Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textWhen Brian was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2010, his friend Alison offered to write letters to cheer him up. Over the next two years, as Brian's cancer moved from stage III to IV, Alison's letters kept on coming.The letters became part of Brian's recovery process, while Alison discovered a passion for writing she never knew existed. Brian is now cancer-free, Alison is a writer, and the two have a relationship that only the term ‘best friends' can describe. Alison and Brian are now dedicated to getting us all writing letters through their charity, https://www.frommetoyouletters.co.uk/aboutThank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a textWhat happens when ordinary people are faced with extraordinary choices?In her second blistering novel set on the Channel Island of Jersey, Beyond Summerland, author Jenny Le Coat turns her attentions to the often overlooked issue of what happened after Liberation Day...Jean Parris was a child when her adored father was taken away by the Nazis. As she and her mother wait anxiously for news, the life Jean thought she knew begins to fall apart.Hazel Le Tourneur has never conformed to the island's idea of perfect womanhood. But is she the worst kind of collaborator – an informer?In the summer of 1945, the Liberation of Jersey has unleashed a different kind of war: one of suspicion, accusation and revenge. For among the heroism and sacrifice, there has also been betrayal and corruption. And while the beautiful island is permanently scarred by gun towers and bunkers, its people must learn to live with a different kind of wound – the desire for truth.Jenny Lecoat is a novelist and screenwriter. Her debut novel The Girl From the Channel Islands was a New York Times bestseller.In the 1980s she was one of the first female stand-ups on the UK Alternative Comedy circuit, before going on to write for magazines and newspapers, and later for television.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.This July marks the 136th anniversary of the matchwomens strike at Bryant & May match factory in London's East End in 1888.Exposing the truth of the ‘poor waif matchgirl' historian Louise Raw fills us in on the true story of the vibrant working class women who downed tools, went on strike and changed the course of history.Her work on the Bryant and May Matchwomen altered the way the modern trade union movement was understood.  "It was actually begun by young women and girls, regarded by their supposed betters as the 'lowest of the low'," Louise explains in this episode, "but who changed the world for working women, using sisterhood and long hatpins!"Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.Ivor was just 12 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz. He survived with the help of his older brother, but the rest of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.He was brought to England in November 1945 as one of a group of orphans,  and started forging a new life. Ivor built a successful clothes manufacturing company; married and had four children (and now six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren). For half a century, the past stayed in the past – until it could be contained no longer.Eventually, he started to open up – describing the luck, hope, belief and love that have helped him to live and he wrote his own book, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chicken-Soup-Under-Tree-Journey/dp/1999378156I visited Ivor in his London home and found a warm, curious and intelligent man. But the past is always there as he explains in this open and honest discussion.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.Swathed in luxurious fur coats, wearing diamond rings as a knuckledusters and hats to hide their stolen wares, Britain's most notorious all-female gang ruled the tenements of Waterloo and Elephant and Castle and earned the respect of Soho's most feared underworld bosses. In this fascinating conversation, bestselling author Beezy Marsh reveals how she discovered the story of this notorious gang at a funeral and then used painstaking investigative journalism to uncover the richness and complexity of the lives of the so-called, Forty Thieves.  The result is her new gangland series, The Queen of Thieves.Beezy Marsh is a Sunday Times top-ten best-selling author and journalist who puts family and relationships at the heart of her writing. She believes that ordinary lives are extraordinary. Her historical novels featuring the gritty lives of working class women in the first half of the twentieth century have spent six weeks in the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list in the U.K. and nine weeks at the coveted #1 slot in Canada. Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.Mervyn Kersh recently celebrated his 99th birthday.  Nearly a century of life on earth and what a life he has had. The hair may have turned silver, but he still has the same twinkle in his eye that he had as a young man.I went to visit Mervyn at his immaculate home in Cockfosters, which he shares with his two cats, and over a cup of tea and ginger biscuits he told me his remarkable story. In this episode you can listen to his experiences of the D Day landings, entering a booby-trapped chateaux,  battling his way across France and into Germany and the horror of stumbling across newly-liberated concentration camp Bergen Belsen.From there Mervyn was told to prepare to go to the Far East. 'The Japanese heard I was coming so they surrendered,' he joked. Instead, he was sent to Egypt where he contracted dysentery. By the time he was demobbed and returned home he was so brown and skinny his own mother didn't recognise him. 'Can I help you?' she asked as he walked up the garden path.Mervyn attempted to settle back into life as a civilian, but it was hard. 'Every job I applied for I was told I was too old. I was 22. How could I have come earlier?'Eventually he found his calling in journalism, settled to civilian life, married a lovely lady and had three children. In 2015 he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur, France's highest military honour. He is also president of the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women. Every year he returns to Normandy to take part in commemoration services, but the visits he enjoys most are to secondary schools. He tells children his extraordinary story and sings them a song that goes like this.'Me and my wise old horsey. The times I've heard him say, the trouble with the world is the people who live in it. They've all learned to get, but they've never learn to give in it. You'll never build a world, a decent sort of world. You'll never build a world that way.'Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.98 years ago today, Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in California. She went onto become the legend that was Marilyn Monroe.No one knows more about Marilyn than writer Michelle Morgan who has dedicated her life to peeling back the layers of this fascinating woman. In this conversation Michelle  shares the lesser known sides of Marilyn and reveals a warm, funny woman who loved reading and nothing more than browsing dusty book shelves. Monroe was a passionate book lover with a personal library containing over 400 titles. She read prolifically, devouring not only novels, drama, and poetry, but also nonfiction works dealing with psychology, politics, religion, philosophy, travel, and history.Join us as we journey back to the 1950s and uncover the secret life of Marilyn MunroeThank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.The BBC's period drama “Call the Midwife” made an eccentric, lovable community of nuns and nurses famous the world over. But what of the formidable East End mothers whose babies they delivered? Join me, Kate Thompson and Smithsonian historian Alan Capps as we delve deep into the social history of some truly remarkable women.During the 20th century, London's history-rich East End, in common with all working-class communities, was a fiercely matriarchal society. Women in aprons and button-up boots were the beating heart of the tenement neighborhoods. It was the matriarchs—or so-called “aunties”—who ruled the sooty cobblestone streets, kept the children fed, birthed the babies when there was no midwife to call, and laid out the dead.I reveal how these often-overlooked working-class mothers informally but powerfully led their communities and the ways in which they contributed the to the diverse economic, political, and cultural shaping of the East End. And as this May marks 83 years since the end of the Blitz, I celebrate the astonishing ingenuity, resilience, and strength of the East End women who faced the horrors of war in their own neighborhood streets.We also discuss the importance of documenting social histories and how I brought the stories of these unrecognized women into the spotlight. I hope you enjoy. Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.Maggie Brookes is an ex-journalist, BBC TV producer and creative writing lecturer, now full-time novelist and poet.  She was born in London and has been writing stories and poems since she was six. Maggie says: "The principal theme which recurs in my work is the strength and courage of women in adversity.  I am drawn to stories which take place in wartime because because of my parents' experience in the second world war.  My dad was a prisoner of war and my mum was a nurse. I think I get my abhorrence of war from the waste of life they witnessed. War shows the human race at its worst, and yet can also bring out the best of it."In this conversation Maggie reveals how she  uncovered the Spanish Civil war's hidden heroes for her latest book, Acts of Love and War and how she feels her way into an authentic version of the past. Plus her intriguing encounter in a lift!Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.99-year-old Professor George Leitmann is a unique man. He is both a holocaust survivor and a WW2 US Army veteran who helped to liberate Nazi occupied France and Germany. Nazi persecution of Jewish people forced George and his family to flee their home in Austria and emigrate to the USA. Tragically, his father Josef was unable to get a visa to join them. Initially the family received Red Cross Messages from Josef but by 1940 these had stopped.As soon as he was old enough, George volunteered to join the United States Army, becoming an non-commissioned officer with the 286th Combat Engineer Battalion. In 1944, he sailed back across the Atlantic and returned to European soil, this time as a soldier in order to fight the scourge of fascism and look for his father. His tremendous acts of bravery and sacrifice were recognised when he was awarded the prestigious French Legion of Honour in 2013.I am hugely grateful to George for sharing his extraordinary story with me in this remarkable episode.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Send us a Text Message.In this episode, award-winning historical fiction author, Hazel Gaynor remembers the World War Two ‘seaevacuees', the children sent away from Britain by sea to escape the bombings at home. This is an often-forgotten part of the history of the war, overshadowed by more familiar events, and it inspired Hazel to write her new novel, The Last Lifeboat.Here she shares the heroine at the heart of this survival story, how she researched it and why these women and children deserve to be remembered.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

In The Sugar Girls of Love Lane, out today, Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, the authors of the Sunday Times bestseller The Sugar Girls, tell the remarkable stories of those who worked at the famous Tate & Lyle factory in Liverpool.  For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate's flagship sugar refinery at Love Lane dominated the Liverpool skyline – and was the beating heart of the local community. More than 10,000 workers passed through the doors of the factory during its lifetime, with some families counting four or even five generations of service. Young women leaving school in the post-war years were drawn by the good wages and the unrivalled social life that Tate & Lyle offered.When they arrived, they started at the very bottom, sweeping sugar off the floors, before graduating to packing and weighing by hand. The work was tough, with girls expected to stack heavy bags of sugar onto pallets five feet high, and by the end of the day their arms were aching and their stockings full of sugar dust. But, despite the hot, heavy work, they found their own ways of having fun, and the friendships they formed would last a lifetime. As well as the female friendships, many women met their future husbands at the factory, and expected their own children to follow in their footsteps.Duncan and Nuala's social history of the post-war era casts a warm and nostalgic look back at one of the most iconic factories in the north, bringing back a vanished era of hard work, community spirit and simple pleasures.  In this episode, Duncan reveals how he set about researching and writing his latest book, the challenges of writing non-fiction and why social histories set in the 1960s are ripe for exploration.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

‘Reading gives us a privacy of the mind. Librarians are heroes.' Librarian turned bestselling author Janet Skeslien Charles told me. In this episode we discuss the remarkable true story behind the brave Parisian librarians in WW2 who inspired The Paris Library. Her new book, Miss Morgan's Book Brigade, out April 30 2024, based on a true story of a group of intrepid women who lived in a crumbling chateau 40 miles from the front in WW1 to help heal the atrocities of war. We discuss censorship, the craft of writing, plotting and the research that helps us feel our way into the past. Janet is the ultimate bibliophile. If you love books about books, this is the episode for you.Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

This year marks 112 years since the Titanic hit an iceberg on 14 April 1912, and in that time the doomed vessel has spawned countless myths, thousands of books and, of course, James Cameron's Oscar-winning film Titanic . But In our quest to get to get closer to the so-called ‘Ship of Dreams' have we overlooked the human tragedy at the heart of the disaster? In this conversation, historian and author Claes Wetterholm, from Stockholm, reveals some heartbreaking, untold personal stories…

Libraries are about so much more than books. Just ask librarian for Kingston Upon Thames, Marion Tessier, who trained as a boardgame librarian. On National Boardgame Day, she gives us a fasincating glimpse into her job. 

Brianna Labuskes is more than just a gifted writer,  she is a story hunter, who delves deep into the past and finds histories forgotten heroines.  In this fascinating conversation, Brianna shares the true story of the Council of Books in Wartime--the WWII organisation founded by booksellers, publishers, librarians, and authors to use books as "weapons in the war of ideas" This book inspired, The Librarian of Burned Books.Her latest, The Lost Book of Bonn,  is about the librarians who worked for the Library of Congress, sent to Germany as part of an effort led by the Monuments Men to return Nazi-plundered books to their rightful owners.  Both of these titles are a book lovers dream. 'Language has always been a reflection of ourselves, and silencing it, banning it, destroying it, silences, bans and destroys people,' Brianna says.

It's March, the month of daffodils, pussy willow and lambs - what better time to pay a visit to Twig Farm!Paula Steer is one of a new breed of shepherdesses blazing a trail across social media. Paula's been farming sheep farm at Twig Farm in Devon for the past twenty years, following in the footsteps of her great-great grandmother Lily Warne. Despite battling a brain tumour this irrepressible female sheep farmer is also writing her memoirs. I started by asking her how she made the leap from accountancy to sheep…To visit Paula's divine shop, Lily Warne Wool, click here  

Historical fiction author, Jacquie Bloese draws her inspiration from atmospheric locations with intriguing histories, and people – both real and imaginary – whose stories are calling out to be told. Her latest release, The Golden Hour, set in Victorian Brighton is a compelling and deeply atmospheric read. In this fascinating episode, Jacquie discuses the inspiration for her second novel, the challenges of researching the Victorian age and growing up in Guernsey, the island which inspired her debut novel, The French House,_________________________________________________________________________________________In the genteel squares of late-Victorian Brighton, Ellen and Reynold Harper - twins, companions, colleagues - ply their trade as portrait photographers.But at the golden hour, the models arrive to pose for the lucrative - and illicit - photographs that really keep the Harpers' business afloat. This is the other, shadowy world of the city: a world of erotic tableaux, boundary-crossing music hall performers, and the sinister figure of the local gangster, the Croc.When Ellen is drawn into the orbit of unhappy newly-wed Clementine, she finds herself torn between loyalty to her brother, her dangerous attraction to new model, Lily, and her burgeoning friendship with Clem. And as the two worlds of Brighton collide, the three women discover that there is only a knife edge between the promise of freedom, and the threat of ruin . . .Atmospheric, sensual and powerfully moving, The Golden Hour is a spellbinding portrait of three women determined to find their freedom - perfect for fans of Sarah Waters, The Doll Factory and The Essex Serpent.

To celebrate the launch of my thirteenth book, The Wartime Book Club, historical fiction author Iona Grey has turned the tables and is asking me the questions.In this discussion we talk about the Occupation of the Channel Islands, how I discovered and researched the story, how and why we write and SO much more. I hope you enjoy. Kate x

From the author of The School for German Brides, this captivating historical novel  by Aimie K.Runyan is set in nineteenth-century and post-World War II Paris follows two fierce women of the same family, generations apart, who find that their futures lie in the four walls of a simple bakery in a tiny corner of Montmartre.In this episode, Aimie discusses ideas, writing, history, research, unsung heroines...and of course warm crusty baguettes.The Paris Bakery....1870: The Prussians are at the city gates, intent to starve Paris into submission. Lisette Vigneau--headstrong, willful, and often ignored by her wealthy parents--awaits the outcome of the war from her parents' grand home in the Place Royale in the very heart of the city. When an excursion throws her into the path of a revolutionary National Guardsman, Theodore Fournier, her destiny is forever changed. She gives up her life of luxury to join in the fight for a Paris of the People. She opens a small bakery with the hopes of being a vital boon to the impoverished neighborhood in its hour of need. When the city falls into famine, and then rebellion, her resolve to give up the comforts of her past life is sorely tested.1946: Nineteen-year-old Micheline Chartier is coping with the loss of her father and the disappearance of her mother during the war. In their absence, she is charged with the raising of her two younger sisters. At the hand of a well-meaning neighbor, Micheline finds herself enrolled in a prestigious baking academy with her entire life mapped out for her. Feeling trapped and desperately unequal to the task of raising two young girls, she becomes obsessed with finding her mother. Her classmate at the academy, Laurent Tanet, may be the only one capable of helping Micheline move on from the past and begin creating a future for herself.Both women must grapple with loss, learn to accept love, and face impossible choices armed with little more than their courage and a belief that a bit of flour, yeast, sugar, and love can bring about a revolution of their own.

Louise Moorish is a multifaceted woman. School librarian by day, novelist by night. Here Louise tells how she ‘broke through the wall' and got that publishing deal for Operation Moonlight  – after 50 rejection letters from literary agents. Louise also shares her top tips on how to get a reluctant child to read, the haunted library which still gives her the chills and why, despite a pathological fear of heights, she threw herself from an aeroplane in the name of research.

Congratulations to international bestselling author, Natasha Lester, on the publication of her latest book, The Disappearance of Astrid Briccard out in North America today.Natasha is known to her army of fans around the world for her evocative and escapist storytelling, focusing on the women the history books forgot. In this episode she shares her tips and advice for research and writing, her love of strong women like war photographer Lee Miller and the novel that made her want to be a writer, as well as an exclusive peek into the French resistance heroine who stole her heart. Book and history lovers, you do not want to miss this one.

Holocaust survivor Renee Salt has seen things no human should ever witness, much less an innocent 15-year-old girl. Her experiences of Łódź Ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and then Bergen-Belsen bear witness to some of the foulest atrocities of the past.And yet, this remarkable 94-year-old woman tells her story of surviving unspeakable evil over and over, so that "we never forget. We never think that it was not true."I went to interview Reneee in her North London home and asked her to share her story of courage and survival, including the remarkable coincidence that led her to the love of her life.

Louise Fein is a bestselling historical fiction writer of books set mainly in the early half of the twentieth century. Her novels explore turbulent times, social change, ideas and themes still relevant today.Her latest release, out this week, The London Bookshop Affair is a is a gripping story of secrets and love set against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis.In this conversation we get under the skin of historical fiction, chatting about the challenges and joys of research, writing, plotting and routines.  And why books about books have such a hold on our heart.

Andie Newton is the USA Today bestselling author of THE GIRLS FROM THE BEACH, THE GIRL FROM VICHY and THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND. She has a Bachelor's degree in History from Washington State University and a Master in Teaching. In this conversation we talk about, A Child for the Reich. inspired by the Nazi kidnapping programme, the challenges and joys of writing historical fiction and where she finds inspiration for her bestselling books.Andie's latest book, The Secret Pianist, is out now.Sisters. Traitors. Spies.When a British RAF Whitley plane comes under fire over the French coast and is forced to drop their cargo, a spy messenger pigeon finds its way into unlikely hands…The occupation has taken much from the Cotillard sisters, and as the Germans increase their forces in the seaside town of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Gabriella, Martine and Simone can't escape the feeling that the walls are closing in.Yet, just as they should be trying to stay under the radar, Martine's discovery of a British messenger pigeon leads them down a new and dangerous path. Gaby would do anything to protect her sisters but when the pianist is forced to teach the step-daughter of a German Commandant, and the town accuses the Cotillards of becoming ‘Bad French' and in allegiance with the enemy, she realizes they have to take the opportunity to fight back that has been handed to them.Now, as the sisters' secrets wing their way to an unknown contact in London, Gaby, Martine and Simone have to wonder – have they opened a lifeline, or sealed their fate?

Congratulations Nancy Revell on the publication of her new book,  A Widow's Choice, out today!Sometimes a book comes along which readers take to their hearts. When Nancy Revell wrote The Shipyard Girls it was an instant success. By the time she had finished Book 12 in the series it continuously made the Sunday Times bestseller list and cemented Nancy as one of Britain's best-loved saga writers. In this fascinating conversation she reveals how reading Gone with the Wind changed her life and the lengths she went to walk in the footsteps of her characters… 

St Bride's Church on London's Fleet Street is one of the most famous and fascinating historic churches in central London. It is known worldwide as the journalists church, offering a spiritual home to all who work in the media.What other churches have risen from the ashes of The Great Fire of London and the Blitz,  acted as a source of support for the poor during the Plague years and inspired the design of the wedding cake?The story of St Bride's is inextricably woven into the heritage of the City of London with a history that stretches back an astonishing 2000 years. Its current rector aptly has a passion for history. The Reverend Dr Alison Joyce was appointed in 2014 and says she ‘probably has the most interesting job in the Church of England.'Living Abroad: Challenging the Myths of Expat LifeA useful, honest, often funny book for those considering or just curious about expat life

For many years now I have tramped the streets of east London in search of history. Unbeknown to me another woman has also been doing the same, but her gaze is fixed on the history you cannot see, the history beneath our feet.Sam Perrin has been a cemetery and death historian for over twenty years, conducting tours of east London plague pits and cemeteries in search of past lives. She holds an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck, University of London, and is currently researching the mass burial sites of epidemic victims. “London is a deathly layer cake. We are constantly walking over the dead,' she reveals. Come and take a virtual tour underground. You can find out more about Sam's tours here, and contact her here:Email: misssamperrin@gmail.comTwitter: @misssamperrinBlog: http://misssamperrin.blogspot.com

Letter writing is a dying art, but fortunately, there are some wonderfully creative souls around resurrecting old love letters and breathing life into them. One of them is Liz Maguire, the love letter collector and originator of  https://www.fleamarketloveletters.com , originally from Washington D.C. and now living in Dublin.From her first acquisition as a teenager of a set of vintage love letters from a flea market, Liz now holds a collection of over 1600 letters. She told me,‘Letters capture the essence of what it is to be living through history. In attics, and drawers and shoe boxes under beds there are hundreds of stories waiting to be told.' Here we delve into her unique archive…

You're 12 years old. Your mother is dead and your father has gone missing. You are wrenched from everyone you know and love and put on a train and sent from your home to a new country, where you don't speak the language, with a group of total strangers.  And you have no idea whether you will ever set eyes on your family again. This was the terrifying reality facing Gabriel Weiss when she boarded a Kindertransport train out of Nazi occupied Vienna in April 1939 and was sent to live in England in the months building up to World War Two. On the 85th anniversary of the Kindertransport scheme, the 97 year old shares her extraordinary story…

20th July 1941. It is a dark night in war-torn Britain. In blacked out Sussex a band of men sit huddled in an old shed, deep in the countryside. One by one they make a pledge to join a very special little wartime club. A toast is drunk to the forming of The Guinea Pig Club.It was the most exclusive club in the world, but as the founding member admitted, "the entrance fee is something most men would not care to pay and the conditions are arduous in the extreme".The club was made up of Allied Aircrew who were all being treated by surgeon Archibald McIndoe for horrific burns suffered whilst in active combat.McIndoe was something of a pioneer, using groundbreaking plastic surgery techniques. He passionately believed that if the injured airmen were to have any future he needed to help them recover their place in the world. Unconventional, the doctor encouraged drinking and flirting with the nurses on the ward. One of the nurses granddaughter's, Dr Emily Mayhew, a military medical historian and author of The Guinea Pig Club: Archibald McIndoe and the RAF in WW11 lifts the lid on a extraordinary wartime club.

August 2023 marked 60 years since one of the most iconic crimes of the 20th century – the Great Train Robbery. Ronnie Biggs emerged as the most notorious member of the gang, and today is synonymous with the 1960s as Lord Lucan and the Profumo Affair. In this conversation, his biographer and friend Chris Pickard gives us a glimpse into his colourful and audacious life. His fascinating book on Ronnie, The Great Train Robber, my autobiography, is out now.                                                                           ***8 August 1963. It is the early hours of the morning, and a group of men are waiting at a railway bridge in Buckinghamshire. They are about to rob a mail train, on its way to London from Glasgow, and they have no idea that on board they will find approximately £2.5 million (over £50 million in today's money) in cash - the largest of its time. Among their number is Ronnie Biggs. He will be remembered long after most of the other names are forgotten, and the money spent or lost. What is it about Ronnie Biggs that fascinates people sixty years on from the crime that made his name? Is it the man or the myth that makes Ron a latter-day Robin Hood - the odd man in the confederation of criminals who held up a train on that fateful day? This is Ronnie Biggs' official autobiography. It tells of one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century. From Ron's daring escape from HMP Wandsworth, to how he managed to outwit and outrun a posse of law enforcement officers as one of the world's most wanted men; from plastic surgery in Paris, and his years on the run in Brazil - complete with two kidnappings and an attempted suicide - to his return to the UK after 13,087 extraordinary days on the run. 

She's written 24 books, many of them critically acclaimed, four of them Sunday Times Bestsellers and one of them in just three weeks, but you've probably never heard of her. Shannon Kyle is a ghost-writer.Ghost-writing has long been publishing's best-kept secret. An estimated ninety per cent of memoirs and non-fiction books on bestseller lists have been written by ghost-writers, yet few readers knew this. But times are changing. Thanks to a number of high profile stories the veil of secrecy has been lifted and now we are getting to know the mysterious ghosts behind some of Britain's biggest bestsellers. Shannon has written for numerous celebrities, but as she explains in this fascinating insight into her life, it's telling extraordinary stories of ordinary people that inspires her most.Shannon is co-creator of The Ghostwriters Agency with Teena Lyons about six months ago. https://www.theghostwritersagency.com The UK's first online platform that matches bestselling and award winning ghostwriters with clients who want to write books. She also has her own podcast called Giving Up the Ghostcast, where she interviews bestselling ghostwriters about their experiences. 

Susan McBeth is a woman steeped in books. She founded Adventures by the Book in 2011 to bring literature to life for readers and book clubs through interesting, unique, and adventurous events and travels with authors. In 2018, she also founded NovelNetwork, a service that provides assistance connecting book clubs and authors. She is a content creator for Fireside hosting virtual author interviews, a former Board member with the Southern California Booksellers Association, and a member of Writing Women of San Diego.  There is nothing this lady doesn't know about authors, readers and how to connect the two. But in this fascinating conversation she reveals how a deathbed plea from her German-born mother ‘I don't want to be forgotten',  led her to uncover a more personal story.

Welcome to a special episode, in which I seek out east London's vanishing wartime voices.From my experience cockneys aren't a dying breed, they are alive and flourishing, part of the cockney diaspora of Essex, Suffolk, Kent and even as far afield as Australia.What is in danger of disappearing are the vanishing voices of wartime East London. Go to East London today and you will hear a myriad of accents, transformed as it is by immigration and gentrification. What you will struggle to hear are the voices that were heard in the shelters, pubs, markets and factories of wartime London. Even less likely, the beautiful lyrical songs, like the one which starts this special episode by east ender Dot Smee who sung in the shelters during the Blitz to drown out the sound of the bombs. Or poetry written and recited by Whitechapel seamstress, Sally Flood to express her frustration at the monotony of wartime work.This episode features three enterprising east enders who, like Dot, didn't just survive during the Second World War, but thrive. Their unique and beautiful voices, songs, poems and memories offer a fascinating glimpse into the kind of people wartime east Londoners are and the war that shaped them. For more true stories from East London, why not check out my only non-fiction book on the wartime matriarchy, The Stepney Doorstep Society.

The strikingly handsome couple looked like they'd stepped straight out of a Hollywood motion picture from the glamorous golden era. The reality was somewhat different.Anka and Bernd met in Nazi occupied Prague, in 1940 and it was love at first sight across a crowded nightclub. Like it was for so many young couples in wartime a whirlwind courtship ensued followed by a wedding. In December 1941, Anka and Bernd were amongst the first transports sent to Terezin, the first camp in Czechoslovakia where they remained for three years. During their time at Terezin, and despite the sexes being segregated, Anka became pregnant with a son. When the Nazis discovered this they were forced to sign a document stating that when the baby was born, it would have to be handed over to the Gestapo to be murdered. In the event, her baby son died of pneumonia two months after his birth.Anka fell pregnant again and this time tried her hardest to keep her pregnancy a secret, knowing full well what would happen should her SS captors discover it.Soon after she fell pregnant, Bernd was deported to Auschwitz in Sept 1944. Heartbreakingly Anka followed him. She was the eternal optimist and thought that as they had survived that long nothing could get any worse…Anka was at Auschwitz for ten days, a time she described as being like ‘Dante's Inferno, hell on earth.' Being young and fit, she was sent to work in a factory near Dresden as slave labour, never to see her husband again. By the spring of 1945 the Germans were retreating and evacuating concentration and slave labour camps. Anka, by now looking like, in her words, ‘a scarcely living pregnant skeleton' was transported on a filthy open coal wagon to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, a horrendous journey that took seventeen days. She weighed 5 stone. So horrified was she to see that she had arrived at yet another concentration camp she immediately went into labour. It's hard to conceive of the following scene. Anka, surrounded by the dead and dying, giving birth in the squalor of a coal wagon. An SS guard walked past and noticed. ‘Carry on screaming,' he told her. Baby Eva came into a cruel world weighing just 3 pounds. Anka attributed her and her baby daughter's survival to luck and timing. The day before she gave birth the Nazis ran out of Zyklon B gas. The day after she gave birth Hitler committed suicide. Soon after Mauthausen was liberated by the Americans.Returning to Prague with her tiny newborn baby girl, Anka stayed with relatives who had also survived the Holocaust. To her devastation she discovered her husband, parents, and two sisters had been murdered at Auschwitz.  Bernd was shot dead near Auschwitz in January 1945, just one week before the camp was liberated. He never knew his wife had fallen pregnant again.Anka met Karel Bergman, a Czech who had fought with the RAF during the war, and moved to Cardiff in 1948 to start a new life.  78 years on, Eva shares her astonishing story. Please be warned, there are some distressing scenes described in this episode.This is one of the most emotional interviews I've done. It reveals not only the depth of the atrocities committed in some of the foulest spots on earth,  but also that life hung on chance, degrees of fate, turn left, turn right, a flick of the whip. Buried within this story are also tiny fragments of humanity that have the power to change a life.How I wish I'd met Eva's extraordinary mother Anka who lived to 96 years old and never tired of telling her daughter ‘You don't know what you can withstand until you are put to the test.'

101 years ago today a large crowd assembled on a crisp October morning in 1922, when Bethnal Green's first permanent public library opened its doors in a handsome red brick building in Barmy Park. The philanthropy of Scottish businessman Andrew Carnegie provided £20,000, and the remaining £16,000 was raised by the local authority.‘The council was handing down to future generations a legacy which would enable them to obtain knowledge and sweep away misery and poverty,' said the Mayor in his opening speech. This was a thinly veiled reference to the fact that only two years previously, an asylum stood on that site.Bethnal ‘madhouse' operated for 120 years in Bethnal Green, East London, and was notorious for its cruel treatment. Even today, most East Enders still refer to the grounds around the library as Barmy Park. Shockingly, the asylum only closed in 1920. Two years later, the library opened in what had been the male block. The disturbingly cruel incarceration of the mentally ill, replaced with learning and literacy. What a message of hope that must have sent to the community. But trials loomed ahead. Eighteen years after the library opened, in September 1940, a bomb crashed through the roof of the adult lending library at 5.55 p.m. on what would later be known as ‘Black Saturday', the start of the Blitz. What had been an orderly and well-equipped library became in a split second a scene of destruction. And here the story takes a surprising twist. Rather than simply hurrying for the nearest shelter, the borough librarian, George F. Vale and his deputy, Stanley Snaith, calmly pulled a tarpaulin over the shattered glass dome roof and set about planning a pioneering social experiment that would transform the lives of wartime Londoners.Bethnal Green Underground was a half-completed stop on the Central Line when war broke out. Builders were working on connecting it to Liverpool Street, but from 1939 it had been locked up and left to the rats. One week after the Blitz began, East Enders defied Churchill's orders not to shelter in Tube stations and claimed their right to safety. At seventy-eight feet below ground, it was one of the few really safe places to shelter in Bethnal Green and was referred to by locals as an ‘Iron Lung'.Over the course of the next twelve months, it was transformed into a fully-functioning subterranean community with an astonishing array of facilities. Metal triple bunks sleeping up to 5,000 stretched three-quarters of a mile up the eastbound tunnel. A shelter ticket reserved you a bunk.There was a three-hundred-seat shelter theatre with a stage and spotlights, which hosted opera and ballet, a cafe, doctor's quarters and a wartime nursery, which enabled newly enfranchised women to go out to work. But here's the best part – there was a library! I love surprises in history and finding out about George and Stanley's secret underground library, built over the boarded-up tracks of the westbound tunnel, felt like nothing short of magic.100 years on from the library's opening, on October 13th 2022, I launched my novel, The Little Wartime Library, in Bethnal Green Library and I was joined by some very special  guests.No one knows more about the complex labyrinth of Tube tunnels that run beneath our feet than Siddy Holloway, actress, historian and presenter of Secrets of the London Underground. 

So many readers have got in touch with me since reading The Little Wartime Library to tell me how much they enjoyed reading about libraries in wartime, a facet of history many of us know so little about.When I began to research the novel I realised I knew precious little about the history of librarianship, so I was lucky enough to stumble upon Anne Welsh. Anne has been a librarian for quarter of a century, mostly working in small, special libraries. Although she has held other roles, as a deputy librarian, library manager and as an academic, cataloguing is her abiding passion. The way people make, share and interact with books fascinates her. She also has a brain bursting with knowledge about the history of librarianship and was kind enough to allow me to pick those copious brains.In this conversation we talk about how war broke down the class barrier, the power of the bodice-ripper in the blackout hours, fighting misogyny in the publishing world and how Reading for Victory changed the face of reading for women forever.If you want to immerse yourself in the surprising history of the library then this is the episode for you.

You can never be sure what you'll discover in the pages of a book. That's even more true if that book is checked out from a library. In twenty years of library work Sharon McKellar from Oakland Library in California has been documenting the weird and wonderful things she finds in library books. From recipes, to kids drawings and crochet hooks and even a backstage concert passes. Each item is an anonymous glimpse into someone's life. Now she's helping reunite readers with their lost relics through her ‘Found in a Library Book' project.

‘We run a ‘Lost Quote' service here at the National Poetry Library,' said Karen Smith, who also told me proudly that nothing feels as natural to her as being a librarian. Lucky Karen is surrounded by poetry books, 250,000 of them to be precise. ‘People contact us all the time. Today I have had two enquiries from people who are looking for poems. Sometimes they can remember one or two lines in a poem, but they don't know who it is by or can't remember the rest of it. Sometimes they are looking for using it at a funeral. It is very gratifying when you find that poem for someone and they can read it at their grandfather's funeral.'Karen, who did a masters degree in modern poetry, is the perfect person to be a poetry detective (there's a novel right there) and has great success, using online databases, or sometimes just good old word of mouth by asking colleagues. They used to pin it on a noticeboard, now they are going to start putting Lost Quotes on the virtual noticeboard of Twitter.I'd bet a lot of people, myself included, had never head of the National Poetry Library, Located in the Royal Festival Hall, looking over the Thames and filled with rainbow-coloured rolling stacks, it sounds almost dreamlike.‘Anyone can visit and it is absolutely free,' Karen insists. ‘We've so many treasures here. Poetry is a distillation of words. The white space on the page is important, the pauses and the unsaid part. I think that is what makes it poignant. A poem is emotionally powerful because it means something different to everyone, you see what you want to see.'

Powerful. Seditious. Pioneering. Not adjectives you would usually associate with librarianship, John Pateman is a passionate believer in creating needs-based libraries and why libraries are about so much more than books.John Pateman has worked in the library system for 44 years, working his way up from a library assistant at Bromley Library in 1978 to Chief Librarian of Thunder Bay Public Library in Canada. Along the way he has picked up awards but also criticism for calling out racism and discrimination. I started by asking about his move to Canada…

Last year,  spoke with Kathleen Milne, a librarian responsible for the running of four remote libraries, each on a Hebridean island. Speaking from Stornoway on the Island of Lewis, she was angry when she told me.‘Here, like everywhere else in the UK, the last decade has been nothing but fire-fighting. Some libraries have been cut and cut and cut. We've never really been able to do what we want to do and we can do. Libraries are a basic human right and I long for the time we don't have to fight and we can concentrate on making a difference. ‘Libraries are part of what it is to be human. It is one of our greatest human achievements..'I started by asking Kathleen how she made the move from South Africa to the outer Hebrides...

It's Libraries Week! To celebrate, I'm releasing one episode everyday this week with some remarkable, creative and courageous librarians with weird and wonderful stories to tell. Meet Angela and Simon Bond. They're the husband and wife librarian team smashing the sssh stereotype. When Angela and Simon Bond are in Pontefract Library it's anything but quiet. In this fascinating chat we explore the enduring value and love for community libraries… 

There are few writers who manage to successfully pull off three genres and write under three different names.Rebecca Mascull writes historical fiction under her real name, saga trilogies under the pen name of Mollie Walton and is shortly due to launch feel good romantic comedies under the pen name Harper Ford. Her new novel, Divorced not Dead came out recently.Becca/Mollie/Harper has navigated ten years in the publishing industry and in this fascinating episode discusses how she trusts her sub-conscious muse to guide her storytelling, the power of pacing, the magic of a ‘history shiver' and how to fight snobbery in publishing.