From the Library With Love

Send us Fan Mail 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 Thank you to our media partner: Family Hist...

Send us Fan Mail 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, r...

Send us Fan Mail 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, despit...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 conve...

Send us Fan Mail 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 an...

Send us Fan Mail 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-love...

Send us Fan Mail 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 y...

Send us Fan Mail 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....

Send us Fan Mail 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 vi...

Send us Fan Mail 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 w...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 fascinat...

Send us Fan Mail 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,...

Send us Fan Mail 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 a...

Send us Fan Mail 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 h...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 generation...

Send us Fan Mail 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 libraria...

Send us Fan Mail 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. E...

Send us Fan Mail ‘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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 B...

Send us Fan Mail 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 d...

Send us Fan Mail 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...