I lived in London, England, in a beautiful Edwardian building near Regent’s Park, for seven years while growing up. I remember being dumbfounded when our doorman told us that some of the windows in our building had been shattered during the Blitz. For the first time in my life, I felt the presence of the past, something immediate and present and not relegated to dusty history books. I never forgot it, and our flat transformed from a place to live to a piece of history I could touch and experience firsthand.
When I became a writer, I knew I would one day return to London, using it and my building as a setting for a future novel. This book is the culmination of nearly a decade of plotting, of using what I knew and adding research about the tumultuous years of the Second World War and the London Blitz.
Harley House is a real place, although vastly different from when I lived in it. I’ve used as many facts as I could to make it as accurate as possible but have had to resort to artistic license to make it fit into my story.
The historical facts of the time period are taken from eyewitness accounts, archival sources, and well-researched historical records. Any errors in recreating fact as fiction are completely mine.