A MESSAGE FROM TANIA CROSSE

Hi, there, I’m Tania Crosse and I write historical novels. My passion is to place my characters in difficult circumstances and see how they react. I’ve written four stories set in London and Kent, one of which won Saga of the Year at the coveted Romantic Novelists’ Association Awards, but I’m mainly known for my Devonshire Sagas series, which covers the Victorian era through to the 1950s, and have all been published by the lovely team at Joffe Books.

My new release, The Butterfly Girl, is number eleven in the Devonshire series, and is the second WW2 epic. This time, we see events through the eyes of a student nurse, Pippa. The action starts on one of the worst nights of the Plymouth Blitz when, tragically, the hospital where she is working receives a direct hit. This book is particularly close to my heart as much of what we see of Pippa’s training was inspired by the numerous stories my mother related of her time as a nurse during the London Blitz. You can imagine that people were desperate to escape the appalling bombings, and at night, many in Plymouth travelled up to nearby Dartmoor. Others took refuge in the market town of Tavistock, and the tale is partly set there too, as our heroine meets up with the medical family we have already seen in previous titles. It is an oft forgotten fact that Tavistock was extremely important to the build up to D-Day, which I illustrate in the story.

Like most authors, I love to read, mainly sagas and other books similar to my own, but sometimes I do read genres. One book I can recommend is The Forgotten Life of Connie Harris, the debut novel by Carryl Church, published by Choc Lit, an imprint of Joffe Books. It’s an astonishing, skilfully written dual timeline story, based around a projectionist’s role in a cinema in times gone by.