"I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction."
- Sara Sheridan
"He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn’t shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back."
"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before ..."
"The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum."
"Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true."
"Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel."
"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few wee..."
"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?"
"It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh."
"Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another."