Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in small-town America, very far from where I was born (London), with a strong desire to travel and explore. I also developed a thirst for history—the older the better! At eighteen, I went to work on European digs before studying Archaeology in the UK and teaching in Southern Africa. Across these adventures I both experienced and witnessed the victimization of young women—an even more common ordeal in the past. So now I write historical fiction about resourceful, brave women who strive to be the active, powerful centres of their own stories. I hope you find the books on my list as inspiring as I do!


I wrote

Book cover of The Errant Hours

What is my book about?

My first medieval novel and Book One of The Arrowsmith Trilogy is the story of Illesa, a young woman more…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Smilla's Sense of Snow

Kate Innes Why did I love this book?

I have reread this novel several times since I discovered it in the 1990s, and it continues to surprise and thrill me. Smilla Jasperson is the most original heroine I’ve ever come across. Rude, tortured, brilliant, philosophical, strong, vulnerable—she is half Greenlandic Inuit/half Danish, and her heart has been broken by the loss of both mother and country. At the start of the novel it is broken again when a young, neglected boy, she’d finally allowed herself to love, dies. The authorities claim it’s accidental but Smilla immediately knows, because she understands snow, that he has been killed. The plot follows her investigation and extraction of justice—in all its raw violence. Smilla verges on the superheroic, but somehow Peter Høeg made me believe in her completely. 

By Peter Hoeg,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Smilla's Sense of Snow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Time Best Book of the Year · An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year · A People Best Book of the Year · Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award · A Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel

First published in 1992, Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow instantly became an international sensation. When caustic Smilla Jaspersen discovers that her neighbor--a neglected six-year-old boy, and possibly her only friend--has died in a tragic accident, a peculiar intuition tells her it was murder. Unpredictable to the last page, Smilla's Sense of Snow is one of the…


Book cover of Code Name Verity

Kate Innes Why did I love this book?

I was recently drawn to this book because of its unusual central characters—two young women, Julie and Maddie, from very different backgrounds, who become friends during WW2. Both women are doing crucial work, not being the object of desire for a man, not competing with one another. I read it in one sitting. The ingenious structure starts with a ‘confession’ by SOE recruit Julie, written under torture by the Nazis in France, which reveals the depth of her friendship with Maddie, a pilot, supposedly just transporting planes for the RAF, who ends up hiding in occupied France trying to free her friend from the most appalling fate. I found it clever, moving, and unputdownable. Code Name Verity is marketed as YA but was quite graphic enough for this adult!

By Elizabeth Wein,

Why should I read it?

10 authors picked Code Name Verity as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 14, 15, 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

'I have two weeks. You'll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.'

Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, Code Name Verity is a bestselling tale of friendship and courage set against the backdrop of World War Two.

Only in wartime could a stalwart lass from Manchester rub shoulders with a Scottish aristocrat, one a pilot, the other a special operations executive. When a vital mission goes wrong, and one of the friends has to bail out of a faulty plane over France, she is captured by the Gestapo and becomes a prisoner of war. The story begins in…


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Book cover of Spoliation

Spoliation By Ian J. Miller,

To hide a corporation’s failure to properly service a space ship, Captain Jonas Stryker is prosecuted but saved from imprisonment by a dying man, who hires Stryker to collect asteroids for their mineral content. Stryker soon finds he must stop a shadowy corporate group called The Board, who employ space…

Book cover of Yuki Means Happiness

Kate Innes Why did I love this book?

I know nearly nothing about the Far East—so was delighted to experience a taste of Japan through this compassionate, original novel told from the point of view of young American nurse, Diana, as she takes the job of nanny to the toddler Yuki, after divorce has forced Yuki’s mother from the family home. Immersed in a different culture, Diana feels confusion, fascination, and a growing love for Yuki. The tension builds as she begins to understand the real danger the child is in. Diana faces psychological peril as she tries to break the chain of damage for Yuki—and herself. As a mother of three, I often can’t bear child jeopardy in a plot, but the author’s intelligent writing is compelling and sensitive, not gratuitous. 

By Alison Jean Lester,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Yuki Means Happiness as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A mystery, a love story and a fascinating encounter with a different culture, Yuki Means Happiness is an outstanding novel' John Boyne

Diana is young and uneasy in a new relationship when she leaves America and moves halfway around the world to Tokyo seeking adventure. In Japan she takes a job as a nanny to two-year-old Yuki Yoshimura and sets about adapting to a routine of English practice, ballet and swimming lessons, and Japanese cooking.

But as Diana becomes increasingly attached to Yuki she also becomes aware that everything in the Yoshimura household isn't as it first seemed. Before long,…


Book cover of The Siege

Kate Innes Why did I love this book?

When I teach creative writing, I often use this excellent historical novel set in the USSR during WW2 as an example. There are scenes from this book seared into my memory—they are so powerful, visceral, and moving.. Helen Dunmore is able to put the reader in the centre of the most harrowing circumstances, where people are starving, freezing, and dying in the thousands, and yet allow us to care about the individual and feel uplifted by their struggle. In Leningrad, Anna has already lost her mother, who died giving birth to her baby brother, Kolya. During the brutal siege of 1941-44, Anna must somehow keep her young brother alive without losing her humanity. A story of one ordinary woman pushed to extraordinary braveryrepresenting so many.

By Helen Dunmore,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Siege as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate. One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist's life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a…


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Book cover of Follow Me to Africa

Follow Me to Africa By Penny Haw,

Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.

It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the…

Book cover of Restless

Kate Innes Why did I love this book?

This highly original spy thriller gripped me from the first page. It jumps between the 1970s and WW2, with locations in Britain, America, Paris, and Belgium. Ruth Gilmartin’s mother Sally, to all intents and purposes a sweet old lady living in a small English village, decides to reveal that she is in fact Eva Delectorskya, a Russian recruited by the British Secret Service, and she wants her daughter, a single mother teaching EFL, to help her find and take revenge on the double agent who sold her out decades before. The writing is tight and elegant, leaving lots of room for the big issues of motherhood, trust, treachery, and standing up to power.

By William Boyd,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Restless as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Eva Delectorskaya,' I said mystified. ' Who's that?' 'Me,' she said. 'I am Eva Delectorskaya.' What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? During the long, hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigre and one-time spy. In 1939 Eva is a beautiful twenty-eight year old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become…


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of The Errant Hours

What is my book about?

My first medieval novel and Book One of The Arrowsmith Trilogy is the story of Illesa, a young woman more or less alone in Plantagenet Britain, as she struggles to save the life of her brother, and then her own in the face of poverty, violence, and corruption. Both a fast-paced tale of courage and a slow-burn romance, this novel interweaves real historical treasures, legends, and facts in an exuberant literary adventure. 

Set in the Welsh Marches where I live, the action is underpinned by extensive historical research. The Errant Hours is a Historical Novel Society Editor’s Choice.

Book cover of Smilla's Sense of Snow
Book cover of Code Name Verity
Book cover of Yuki Means Happiness

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Interested in family secrets, the Siege of Leningrad, and Japan?

Family Secrets 211 books
Japan 517 books