The Last Train from Paris is a story I’ve been longing to write, ever since I was a little girl and my mum first told me about studying French near Paris on the day war broke out in 1939. I couldn’t imagine then what it must have been like to have been a 17-year-old English girl on her own, catching the train to Calais through a country preparing for war and finding herself on a ferry in the middle of the Channel, stalked by a German submarine.

It’s a story that’s haunted me, especially since we found the letters Mum exchanged with my dad in London, and the scribbled note she sent him when she finally arrived in Dover.

All the characters in The Last Train from Paris are imaginary, as are their stories, but they are woven from my research and things my mum told me, along with memories of my teachers at school, several of whom were refugees from France and Germany, along with Holocaust survivors. These were people I viewed simply old at the time, but I hope can now see more clearly as the young girl who survived a concentration camp, the German teenager fleeing alone through war-torn Europe as his only chance of survival. All survivors of human cruelty, saved by human kindness, who lived their lives forever touched by what they had experienced.