Quotes from Sara Sheridan

Didn't young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

You became the sum total of where you lived, where you shopped, which church you went to, how many kids you had and which taxi company you used, and you only associated with people who had the same responses on their list.

Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking.

If peace came it would have to do so when there had been time to allow the hatred to grow out of people's thinking.

For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.

Afternoon drinkers shifted in the gloom as if they sensed new blood.

You couldn't see the soldiers as people. They were icons.

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

In wartime, she thought to herself, you don't call a death murder.

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.

It's not until you're older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.

I always fancied myself in a Ford convertible with the roof down – if we ever get a sunny day. Racing down a country road in a Deluxe Or maybe a Ferrari 166. That's glamour.

It was so difficult to dress appropriately when the seasons changed – the British weather was the nothing if not erratic. Spring was the worst – freezing in Brighton this morning and then practically tropical in Knightsbridge in the afternoon.

It is through our extended family that we first learn to compromise and come to an understanding that even if we don't always agree about things we can still love and look out for each other.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child – coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.

Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures.

There was something unbearable about the damp, dark earth closing over a coffin and the still, empty flesh that was inside. She had attended a hundred funerals, but when you really loved someone there was something too final about a burial. Something brutal.

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one's judgement.

Mrs Beaumont shrugged. 'Dougie travelled light in life,' she said. 'He knew it was people who were important.

I think that everyone has something that they will kill for.

Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she'd bolt.