1–What is the title of your latest release? CORONATION YEAR 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Come stay at the historic Blue Lion hotel for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 – and help to foil disaster while you’re there! 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? I knew right away that it would be set in London, but where exactly? Since I wanted my characters to watch the coronation procession pass by, I decided it would be a hotel. And since the exact hotel I imagined never existed, I created the Blue Lion. If you go to the place I describe in the book you’ll find a very nice public house, but no hotel. Sorry! 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Absolutely! Edie is exactly the sort of person I’d like to have as a friend. And she serves a really delicious afternoon tea at her hotel. 5–What are three words that describe your protagonist? Lonely. Hopeful. Brave. 6–What’s something you learned while writing this book? So many tiny details about the history of coronations. My kids have already refused to watch the king’s coronation in…

Jen: What inspired you to write OUR DARKEST NIGHT? Jennifer: After finishing work on THE GOWN, I jumped into work on a book set in…well, I don’t really want to say, since I may return to it some day! I spent months researching and plotting it, but when it was time to buckle down and write the thing, I just couldn’t do it. I was trying to figure out what to do next when my son came to me and asked if it was true that his great-grandparents, my husband’s maternal grandparents, helped to hide Jewish families from the Nazis during the war. And I had to admit that I wasn’t sure – but I told him I would try to find out. It didn’t take a lot of digging for me to discover that San Zenone degli Ezzelini, the small town in northern Italy where my mother-in-law grew up, was a focus of resistance against the Nazi occupation in World War Two, and specifically that the local priest had organized shelter for dozens of Italian Jews. Father Oddo Stocco was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2010, and while I wasn’t able to prove conclusively that…

Inspired by the release of the new film “Dunkirk,” which explores the rescue of the trapped British Expeditionary Force (by every vessel the British could muster, from Royal Navy warships to fishing boats to ferries,) this month we’ll look at fiction set in World War II. One of my favorite dramatizations of Dunkirk was an episode of the BBC series “Foyle’s War,” which shows this dramatic event from the home-front perspective. Our first two selections also show the war from the view of the British home front. In Jennifer Robson’s GOODNIGHT FROM LONDON, American Ruby Sutton feels her journalistic career is on the fast track when, in the summer of 1940, she wins the job as staff writer for a newsmagazine in London. She’s just started to adjust to living in a new country—and dealing with some of her colleagues’ resentment of her for being both a woman and an American—when the nightmare known as the Blitz begins. As the nightly bombings stretch from weeks into months, Ruby learns the depths of her own strength, the true meaning of friendship and community, and the heartache of love in wartime. Inspired by events in the life of the author’s grandmother, GOODNIGHT…