Show notes
Best-selling award-winning novelist Sarah Sundin, author of beloved World War II stories, never had an ambition to write. She trained as a pharmacist, she was perfectly happy as a pharmacist, and then she had a dream that wouldn’t let her go.
She started jotting down her dream story in pencil in a kiddies notebook and six months later she had 700 pages…
Hi I’m you host Jenny Wheeler and today on Binge Reading Sarah talks about her latest daring, dramatic and romantic story, Embers in The London Sky, exploring the war through the eyes of a mother who has lost her child, and a BBC journalist who knows reporting the truth will take him deep into the flames.
She tells all about that vivid dream that started it all, and recollects her own family connections with the war we just can’t seem to forget.
Our Giveaway – Romance
Our giveaway this week is Enemies To Lovers Clean and Wholesome romance. If you can’t resist a good Enemies to Lovers story this one is for you! Details of where to find the links to these books are in the show notes for this episode, and in the newsletter I send out with each podcast. If you want to join that just go to our website, the joys of binge reading.com.
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Links To Things We Talked About
American war correspondent Edward R. Murrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_R._Murrow
Some of Murrow’s WWII broadcasts:
London: First Night of the Blitz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVXmJC6mPEk
From a London Rooftop during the Blitz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za2Lus0CkRc
From Buchenwald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhQvPfYSXk
Lofoten Island Raid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q60pIny5WSo
Lofoten Raid: https://www.royalmarineshistory.com/post/operation-claymore#:
Lend-Lease Bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
Holly Varni, On Moonberry Lake;
https://www.hollyvarni.com/
On Moonberry Lake https://www.hollyvarni.com/hollys-books/
German Abwher; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abwehr
Scottish selkie; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie
Introducing author Sarah Sundin
Sarah Sundin, inspirational World War II fiction author
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Sarah. Hello there, Sarah, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with.
Sarah Sundin: Thank you, Jenny. It’s great to be here.
Jenny Wheeler: Sarah, you’ve been writing these World War II dramas with lots of romance and adventure in them as well since about 2010.
But before that, you were a pharmacist. That’s what your training was in. I wonder how you made that switch, and why you were interested in doing so.
Sarah Sundin: Honestly, I wasn’t interested in doing so. I was a pharmacist. I enjoyed my job. I, I had small children at the time, and one of the beauties of pharmacy was I was able to do a lot of part-time work.
I only worked one day a week and I was able to be at home with my kids. I thought I had the perfect career and then I had an idea for a story.
It actually came to me in a dream and I had to write it. I never had anything like that happen to me ever before in my life. I’d always been a reader and all little girls who love to read, imagine themselves writing a book. But I never took it seriously, any more than I did becoming a ballerina.
I loved doing ballet, but becoming an author that was, not gonna happen. I never pursued it at all. I love pharmacy. I had this a story idea and I had no idea what I was doing. I’d taken two classes in English in college because I was majoring in chemistry.
I had no idea what I was doing. I just started writing freehand. Literally with a number two pencil on my kids’ lined paper from school, because I didn’t wasn’t going to put it in the computer yet.
I wrote two books like that. And then I started going to writer’s conferences and I joined a writer’s group.
Learning by doing – in 700 pages
I learned I was doing everything wrong, but I learned how to fix it. It ended up -I don’t want to say discarding my first two books – but setting them aside.
They will never be published and that’s okay. They did their job. And my third novel, I started submitting that. That was my first World War II novel actually.
And it took me five years of rejection letters. But eventually I got a contract and that was my first published novel, A Distant Melody, and now I can’t believe it, but I have 16 novels out. It’s been a wild ride.
Jenny Wheeler: I do have to follow up by asking you about that dream. Just give us a very quick idea of what the dream was.
Sarah Sundin: Oh, it was wild! There was a young man in the hospital and he’d been in a coma and he woke up and the woman he was in love with was there, but neither of them knew they were in love with each other. She ends up blurting out how much she loves him and he’s too drugged up after his accident to really respond.
But something about those two characters and their dilemma and this, sudden declaration of love just got me.
That day after I had that dream, I woke up and I had three little kids. My youngest was still in diapers, so I was running the carpool for the oldest and taking the middle one to preschool and washing diapers with a third one.
The story idea was going and going, and the characters were developing. I was picturing scenes and dialogue in my head, and suddenly I had subplots and side characters.
Writing standing in line at Disneyland
I knew enough about books to know it was a novel and it was actually rather a disorienting experience because it never happened to me before, and here was this full form novel in my head and all I knew was I liked it enough that I had to get it down.
I loved those characters and the dialogue … the banter was just zing in my head and I wanted to record it so I didn’t lose it.
So it was weird, As I said, that book will never get published. It has so many problems with it, but I still have a very soft spot in my heart for it because it got me started and it showed me. I wrote by hand, that entire novel. The rough draft was 700 pages.
700 pages! Ridiculous. I wrote that all in six months by hand, during naps and karate practice and ballet practice, and I don’t know what else I was doing then. I even remember scribbling down a scene while we were standing in line at Disneyland. It was almost this manic experience, where the story had just taken over and I had to get it down.
It’s never been like that since. Since then, I’ve had lots of story ideas, but not this just obsessive need to get the story down.
I’m convinced now it was God’s way of getting me started on it because I needed a kickstart. Because there’s no way I would’ve done it if I’d had an idea, gee, I should write a novel and I never would’ve happened.
So I needed that intense experience to get me started.
Sarah Sundin’s first characters sacred
Jenny Wheeler: Do you think that some of the aspects of the characters and themes may have carried over into some of your other books? Are there bits of them that have become valuable or useful as you’ve gone along?
Sarah Sundin: I think all first time authors, most of us in our very first novel, the hero or the heroine is very much like us, and as you begin to write more and more, you realize you can’t write all your novels with your heroes or heroines with your type, your personality and all your experiences and stuff like that.
This novel actually had lots of characters in it, and it was this group of friends, and there were about a dozen really strongly formed characters in that novel, and they were all very different.
So it taught me to write from experiences and personality types that weren’t my own. The experience of doing it and getting comfortable writing in another person’s head, that’s what carried me over the characters themselves. I don’t think so.
The heroine was a nurse and I ended up having a series about nurses, but she was her own person and she hasn’t carried over.
I did end up using the hero. His first name was Tom and I vowed I would never have another Tom because he was the only Tom but I ended up having a Tom in my fourth published novel.
So nothing about them was truly sacred there, but they’re still very precious to me because they got me started in this crazy business.
Getting to know her characters like friends
Jenny Wheeler: It sounds as if they are real people to you.
Sarah Sundin: That’s the thing about being an author. Your characters really become real to you. They’re fully fleshed. I liken it to getting to know a friend.
I meet this character and think, oh, that’s an interesting person. I wanna write about them. But I only know little bits and pieces about them.
And then as I start to outline – I need to have it all set up before I start my rough draft. So, during the outlining process, I’m interviewing them.
I’m giving them personality tests. I’m filling out my plot chart. I have spreadsheet that I fill out, and as I’m doing this, they become more and more real. It starts off like a pen and ink drawing, and then it becomes like a watercolor or an oil painting.
And then when I’m writing the rough draft, then it becomes animated. Then they become. Really real.
It’s like getting to know a friend and the more you know that friend, you find new parts to them and you get deeper and you’ll have a friendship that you’ve had for a long time, and suddenly your friend will say something that makes me say “I didn’t know that about you.”
My husband and I have been married for 30 years. And he said, yeah, I always wanted to be an engineer.
Writing fiction with a God awareness
I said, no, you didn’t. You told me you wanted to be a physician. He says I did, but originally, I wanted to be an engineer. And I said “I did not know that about you.”
And our son’s an engineer, so I would’ve thought that would’ve come up earlier in our marriage, but it never had.
So still after 30 years of marriage, I’m getting to know my husband. It is a very, it’s a similar process with a character. I’m feel like I’m getting to know a friend and with each chapter I dig a little deeper and find out more about them.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. We must get your latest book, before because you mentioned the word GOD, and you are an inspirational fiction author can you tell us a little bit about that aspect. How does that fit into your book?
Sarah Sundin: I write Christian fiction. I am a Christian, so the way I see it is, we talk about a worldview, so we all have a worldview.
How we envision the world works and as a Christian, I see God as very interactive with us, with the world around us. And so, my characters interact with God. They pray to God, they learn about God, they learn about themselves.
They learn about how they’ve erred and their sins and how they need to change. And God, in a way I don’t want to call him a character in the novel, but he’s always present.
And just the way I see the world view with a hopeful ending as opposed to lot of the dystopian stuff that’s oh, the world’s falling pieces and it’s only going to get worse.
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A hope-filled story which ends well
And I tend to have a more of a hope-filled viewpoint because of my relationship with God. I can’t imagine not writing that way, with God being part of the world, because I can’t imagine a world without God in it.
Jenny Wheeler: Lovely, but you don’t particularly try and evangelize in your books, do you?
Sarah Sundin: No, I don’t. I have three characters who have become Christians during the novels. I just finished one that’ll be coming out in 2025.
She has a come to faith moment and, but in general, my characters are people who are already Christians and they’re learning how to be better Christians, because none of us are perfect and we’re all works in progress and growing in our journey.
It is very much keyed into who I am as a Christian. I do a lot of teaching, so I teach women’s bible studies. I teach Sunday school to fourth and fifth graders.
What I do within the church is I’m basically working with people who are generally already Christians and helping them grow in their walk.
With my characters, I have the same impact on their lives. As the author, I’m helping them grow in their walks with God. Though as I said, I have had a couple of characters who were definitely not believers at the beginning of the stories, and they do come to faith.
I try not to do a sermon and the character falling to their knees. And I try not to do like a conversion scene.
Conversion in a cockpit
I think my favorite one the hero is actually, he’s a pilot and it’s in the sky above us, and he’s just messed up and his whole life is messed up and he is actually cussing. I don’t show the cuss words on the page, but he is cussing and cussing and something, I can’t remember what it was he says to himself, but he just realizes that God is the answer.
And that because he’d been raised in the church, he just never believed it. And he actually hits the cockpit and starts bleeding and he thought of the blood of Jesus. And then I cut to black and then I show him a little later.
But, I actually have my conversion scene with him cussing up a storm in the cockpit of his P 51 Mustang.
Jenny Wheeler: In the Second World War, that was probably a pretty vulnerable place to be.
Sarah Sundin: It really was.
Jenny Wheeler: Let’s talk about Embers in the London Sky, which is the latest one of your books.
You do promise that they’re dramatic, that they’re daring, and that they’re romantic and they are. This one traces two key characters. Alida who is a mother trying to find her child who was lost in a chaotic scenes in a middle of a German bombing raid, and Hugh, who is a BBC war correspondent.
They meet and Hugh starts to help her to find her son.
Jenny Wheeler: I admit that I didn’t really think much about the children would’ve obviously got lost during a chaotic war scene.
And you make it clear in the notes at the back of your book that this was a very real thing. Tell us a little about the numbers that were affected.
Millions displaced in World War II
Sarah Sundin: I’m afraid I actually don’t have numbers on that, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get those. There were so many people who were displaced during the war and after the war. There were just millions of people on the road.
People being released from the concentration camps. People who’d been bombed out of their houses all throughout Europe. Soldiers who were trying to get back home.
So there were just millions of displaced people in Europe. But this story takes place early in the war during the invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium and France, and there were at least well over a million people on the road as the Nazis invaded.
And there were instances where parents who were on foot were desperate for their children and would thrust them into cars thinking that at least their child had a better chance to get away in a car than they would on foot.
And then after the war or after the invasion, everything settled down and people were going back home. This is mid-1940 and they couldn’t find their children and the newspapers in Paris were filled with their classified ads with people trying to find their children. That broke my heart as a mom.
That’s what inspired that story. I don’t know any numbers of how many people were separated because of the chaos of war. I don’t know if there are any numbers.
Later on in the story, I mentioned some numbers in Britain where they evacuate the children from the cities to the countryside.
Children were constantly on the move
And in the first couple days of the war, they evacuated one and a half million mothers and children to the countryside, which is a phenomenal logistical feat. They basically took over the railway system and just filed them- all the schools went in together and mothers with young children came together. A million and a half people were moved.
It’s rather incredible feat. Because of what we call the Phony War, where after the defeat of Poland the Western Front pretty much went quiet until April and May of 1940 when the Germans went on the move with the Blitz again.
There was this period about seven, eight months where there really wasn’t much happening and all these children who’d been evacuated to the countryside and their parents said their children are miserable.
We’re miserable to not having them with us. The bombs aren’t falling, so let’s bring our kids home again. All throughout the war, there was this tension being between the families who wanted to be together and the government, which really wanted the children in safety so they weren’t going get killed.
As things got worse, they would have another campaign to get the children to evacuate and then things would quiet down when children would come home. All throughout the war this went on, it wasn’t like children evacuated on September 1st, 1939 and didn’t come back till VE day.
There was this back and forth and I found that very interesting.
Some children never found their way back home
Jenny Wheeler: I guess there must have been some children who were never reunited with their families, even if their parents were still alive. It just would be the case, wouldn’t it?
Sarah Sundin: Yes. Even in Britain some of these children came from, bad homes to begin with, and so their parents really didn’t mind having them out of the house.
And some of them actually became very bonded to their evacuee homes in the countryside. And the foster families really loved their kids.
There were some situations where the kids would either not go home again or some would run away and try to go back to the countryside. But for everyone who did that, there were children who ran away from the country and went back to London because they wanted to be with their families.
There was just so much going on, and especially a lot of these lower income families. The parents – both were working – and oftentimes they depended on the school aged children to watch the little ones.
When the school aged kids were evacuated, that put a hardship on them, so they wanted those kids back for the childcare.
There were so many things that go on and we see these images of the children getting on the trains and we think, oh, it’s sad, but thank goodness they’re being safe.
But when you actually dig into it, imagine what the children were going through. Imagine what the families were going through.
Central character searching for he small son
Imagine where the foster families are going through in the countryside, and suddenly you have children in your home and they’re homesick and maybe they’re wetting the bed and they have behavior issues that you’re not used to because they’re city kids and you’re a nice clean country family.
There was this culture clash and some of the foster families were really willing to have the kids. They were super excited and very compassionate. And others were neglect neglectful, some were abusive, because people are people. There was this broad range of things that happened to the children.
And that’s what I wanted to show in the novel as Alida gets involved, working with the Ministry of Health, which was responsible for the evacuations, as she’s starting to talk to these evacuees and she’s talking to the families back in London and she’s talking to the foster families and the billeting officers who are responsible for keeping everything together in the countryside.
She’s starting to see these issues and it opens her mind. It helped her learn more compassion as she’s watching these people go through it, and it was a way to help her grow as meanwhile, she’s looking for her son.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. So that’s definitely a very important part of the story. The other part is obvious is the whole scene with the covering of the war correspondents. At this stage of the war, the US had not actually entered action, but there were some very important US correspondents sending postings from London, telling the American population what was happening.
Give us an idea of why they were so important.
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The importance of war correspondents
Sarah Sundin: Well, America was obviously geographically isolated. This was before TV. Radio was actually a very new medium. This was the first major war that was covered by radio. In World War I there was no radio which, I dunno why it struck me as, oh, I didn’t know that, but I didn’t know that.
It was a new medium and the radio correspondents and the radio broadcast stations were still learning how to use this new medium well. The BBC was really very much a premier organization.
They were really the first big radio station, and they had done a lot of technological advances and were the first ones to do outdoor broadcasts as opposed to being in the studio with the perfect soundproofed room and all that.
They were doing a lot of technological and broadcasting innovations. They’d started TV before the war, which I surprised me again.
I think of that as real image, a post-war thing. But they actually had brought TV broadcasts before the war. They had to stop during the war. Britain, had one broadcasting company, the BBC, and the entire country gets that.
And they had some regional stations – in America, we call them channels, but they had regional stations too. But they were all part of the BBC.
Now, in America, partly because it’s geographically so widespread, but also because of this, capitalistic free enterprise, anything goes at atmosphere. There are radio stations everywhere.
There are multiple networks. There were small local broadcasts. Companies that were just their own little towns, wherever. And then you had the big networks like NBC and CBS and Mutual.
It was definitely a wild west atmosphere and a lot of competition. And of course competition means innovation.
The radio star – Edward R. Murrow
There were a lot of American innovations too. But where it became really important during the war was Edward R Murrow with CBS was a very popular correspondent.
He had amazing voice, just beautiful deep timber and he way of speaking in simple and profound sentences, short and sweet and deep. And he went to London and because he didn’t have the same sensor censorship, over him as the BBC correspondents.
He was able to do some more things than the BBC corresponds were able to do. He did some live broadcasts. The BBC correspondents weren’t allowed to do some of that early in the war because those broadcasts could be picked up in Germany. So if they’re talking about bombs falling into Trafalgar Square, then the Luftwaffe can say, aha, our bombs hit Trafalgar Square.
Good job on the navigation, or let’s switch, we were off a little bit on a navigation so they could use those live broadcasts to improve their navigation. They had to do delayed broadcasts, but the situation was different in America. So he was recording. There’s this very famous recording of him in Trafalgar Square during a bombing raid, and you can hear the air raid sirens.
He pauses. He doesn’t just talk the whole time. He pauses and picks up those noises. He puts his microphone down to the ground and hears the footsteps of the people on their way to the air raid shelter.
And he is commenting, they’re not running, they’re walking very slowly because they’ve got that beautiful Blitz spirit, the calm spirit of the British and these broadcasts were heard in America.
Before then the American people were split about whether or not they wanted to join the war, but his broadcasts helped push him over the edge because they saw Britain with the bombs falling and they felt it, and they felt those people and their despair, they also really heard their courage and it really helped tip the public opinion toward the allies and toward joining the war.
A BBC correspondent pushing back the rules
Obviously, it wasn’t till Pearl Harbor that America had joined the war, but this type of thing helped. Roosevelt passed the Lend-Lease bill, which was vital to getting to helping Britain fight the war.
I was able to be a part of it. So here’s Hugh, who’s a BBC correspondent, and he is trying to record, but he has some limits on him. And censorship isn’t the right word because the government wasn’t telling the BBC what they had to broadcast, but they were allowing them to self-censor, but they were being very careful because they didn’t want to give any comfort to the Germans.
He’s pushing back against these limits that are on him. Getting into these wonderful debates with an appropriate level of discretion and meanwhile, we actually have Edward R Murrow in a couple of scenes and showing his broadcasts to just show what an international city London was during the war.
And how the British especially how the Blitz really helped persuade the Americans that the allied side was the right side, the only side to be on.
Jenny Wheeler: Some of those broadcast are still available on the web today, aren’t they? I’m sure that people would love to hear some of those, so I’ll make sure that I get the links from you and we’ll put them in the show note for this episode.
You do have you a little later him covering an invasion in Norway.
And that was where he was able to do a live broadcast. And also there is a scene where one of the free French broadcasters who evacuated from Paris when the Germans took over is blamed because he mentions a particular ship, which is then later sunk by the Germans, and he’s blamed for. Giving them the ship’s location in a broadcast.
Tell us a bit about those two episodes.
‘Walls talk’ and the Vichy French were listening
Sarah Sundin: The situation with the French reporter was- I made that up, but it was based similar things that did happen. There was a situation where the Allies and the British and the Free French went to, Dakar in Sierra Leone and they were trying to invade there because it was run by the Vichy French and the Free French wanted to take it over.
And there were French sailors heard in the bars talking about Dakar. Dakar, and when they invaded the Vichy forces were ready for them.
There was a lot of talk about, oh some spies must have heard it or it was broadcast.
And so there was the sense of, oh this information got to the Germans. So there was always that concern. The European services of the VDC, which was, a division of the BBC and they were really very freewheeling too because they were all run, they were all separate departments and they weren’t.
They didn’t fall completely under the BBC. They were all, a lot of ’em were self-governing. They had some British BBC personnel involved, but the French section had a lot of free French reporters. And so they were, there were a lot of pushing back with all these different nations with their own stations that were, they were broadcasting to occupied Europe.
As far as the Lofoten raid, which was in Norway, it was a one day raid where they, there was a second one later on in the war, which wasn’t in my novel, but it was in oh, March, April, 1941. And there was a small group of Norwegian and British commandos who went to this. Lofoten Islands in Norway and they just came in completely surprised the Germans
The attack on a small Norwegian island
There was only a small garrison there. They took all the Germans prisoner, took them back to England, They took all quislings, the Norwegian traitors, they took them back to England, and they took a bunch of Norwegian Patriots who wanted to fight for the Allies and volunteered, and they came back to England and they were able to fight. They destroyed all, these fish oil factories that were used to help make ammunition for the Germans.
It was a big morale booster. There were some problems. I didn’t cover this in the book because they didn’t actually clear it with the Norwegian government in Exile and they were not happy with it. There were some repercussions when the Germans came back to the Lofoten Islands.
They imprisoned a lot of people, put a lot of people in concentration camps, so there were some really bad repercussions, which of course, Hugh would not have known about.
This was not something he would’ve even heard about, but it was a great big morale booster in England. And he actually records he can’t record live because he is in Norway and there’s no way for them to broadcast live from Norway.
But he records it on discs, he is recording it live and then they take the discs back and they were able to play it later. That sense of live coverage where you can hear the sounds and there was an actual Crown film unit is there.
There is some video footage of that raid and I used that as a source for Hugh’s report. And I have links to that broadcast and to a couple of Edward r Murrow’s broadcast on my website. And I’ll give you both of those links after this. But it was really interesting to watch.
Sarah Sundin’s World War II series
Jenny Wheeler: The last few books you’ve done have been standalone novels, but before that you did a number of series, and I just want to mention them, especially to American readers if they are interested in this period, because you have one called Sunrise at Normandy, which is about three brothers who in various ways are linked through the D-Day landings, and another called Wings of Glory, as you’ve mentioned with the B 17, and three brothers who flew in the B 17 bombers.
You’ve also got one about nurses, you do cast a light on the American involvement in the war in a way that perhaps some other writers haven’t done, haven’t you?
Sarah Sundin: Yes, that’s where I started. I was really working – since I am an American – I have an American voice, and it seemed natural. The first the Wings of Glory series, I actually had the brothers coming from the town where I was living. It made it an easy way for me to get their voices down.
As I’ve been writing more and more the last four novels, the standalones some of them have had European main characters like Embers in the London sky.
We have a Dutch refugee and we have a British journalist. I had some American side characters, but I didn’t have any American main characters, which is the first time I’ve done that.
In a couple other books, I’ve had European main characters. The next two books on this contract – it’s not a series, but they’re loosely related -there are three Dutch cousins.
The next book is about a latest cousin Cilla and the next one about her cousin Garrett. And then there are the Scottish hero and the next book, and a heroine from the island of Jersey in the third book. I have once again no American main character. So it’s been fun.
A family link to the war on both sides
Jenny Wheeler: You have a family link to the war as well, don’t you? Tell us a little about that.
Sarah Sundin: My grandfather was in the US Navy. He was a what they called a pharmacist mate.
Now they call them hospital corpsman or a medic basically. He was taking care of people in hospitals and he was a storyteller and his brother… Oh my. He was a character and he was a B 17 bomber pilot, which is why I had my first series follow these brothers who were B 17 bomber pilots.
His B 17 flew into Pearl Harbor during the attack, which was incredible.
And he then flew a tour of duty from Australia, and finished that tour of duty and then flew another tour of duty from England with the eighth Air Force.
He had quite the career. He ended up at the end of the war, he was on in Eisenhower’s headquarters with the Supreme headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.
My other grandfather was unable to fight. He had a heart murmur from rheumatic heart disease as a child, but he was a professor of German and he was a native German speaker. He was able to use his German language skills to help train American soldiers to go in after the Occupation.
They did everything from interrogate prisoners to help displaces people. He was using his skills for the Allied cause, which is really I love that.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, that’s terrific. Look, we’ve had a good talk about these books and we’re starting to run out of time.
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What Sarah Sundin is reading now
Turning to Sarah as reader, tell us what you like to read for your personal pleasure. And if you’ve got anything you’d like to recommend to listeners.
Sarah Sundin: Oh my goodness of course, every writer loves to read. I am super behind on my reading right now. I’ve had a little bit of a family crisis in the last few months and so I have barely done any reading at all except my basic research to get my novel written.
I am halfway through Holly Varni’s book called On Moonberry Lake, which is absolutely delightful.
And I’ve said that in every interview I’ve done for this book in the last 23 months because I’ve been reading it so slowly.
I’ve had almost no free time, but I’m enjoying Holly’s book and it’s fun because she’s a friend. I met her at writer’s conferences long before she was published, so it’s fun to see her being published.
Jenny Wheeler: When you do have a little bit of time, what does your taste extend to?
Sarah Sundin: Because of being a published author, I get a lot of requests to read World War II books, especially for endorsement.
And World War II is very popular right now, so I’ve been reading a lot of World War II fiction. If it were just me, I would read a lot of historical fiction from a variety of eras.
I love time traveling, if you will, in a novel.
But I also like contemporary books. I like the occasional fantasy novel, or thrillers, I like to try different things.
But a lot of my reading right now is almost I don’t want to say assignments because it makes it sound like it’s miserable, but it’s more I need to read this book for endorsement.
I have a lot of books to read for endorsement right now.
Research – and the task of getting it right
Jenny Wheeler: You probably read it from a point of view where your judgements are a little bit more succinct in that area than the average reader because you know so much about the period. Do you find sometimes that you’re finding yourself saying, oh, I know that’s not right.
Sarah Sundin: Most of what I find now the level of research for novels has become such a high bar. The work that’s being done by historical novelists right now is phenomenal.
In general, I would say 90% of the books I read that are World War II, I can say, wow, they really did the research.
I can tell. It’s tin he detail, the big details, the little details, just the knowledge, that deep knowledge of the era.
And I’m just seeing such a wonderful depth knowledge of the knowledge base. Where I do see errors, every once in a while I’ll read one where I can tell they have not done their research.
They’ve read two or three books and try to write book from those books usually don’t get an endorsement. I may enjoy the story, but I personally can’t endorse it.
What I will notice is, occasional minor things, and they’re so minor that only people like me are going to pick up on them.
And it’s also the type of thing that I know I make the same type of minor errors in my book, because sometimes it’s not about what you know or what you don’t know, but knowing what questions to ask.
Sometimes you don’t know the question to ask it. I’ll use my mother’s example. My mother was very upset reading a novel, a historical novel, where the heroine is applying mascara and she’s using a mascara wand, and my mother was incensed.
She says, oh, they didn’t have mascara wands back then. They had little pot and you dipped your finger in. She was describing how they did it.
The secret of asking the right questions
And I was stunned because I’ve always used a mascara wand. It never occurred to me that there was any other way to apply mascara. If I was writing a historical character and I wanted to have her apply mascara before I talked to my mother, I would’ve had her using a wand because it never occurred to me to ask that question how did you apply mascara in 19 x, x, X.
Unless to ask that question, you may not find the answer. A lot of these are very minor questions.
I saw one where it was a novel set in Germany during the war, and the heroine is wearing bright red lipstick. And I had just researched a novel set in Germany.
I said, oh no, she couldn’t do that. The Nazis had outlawed makeup. So she definitely wouldn’t have had bright red lipstick.
She might have some powder that she’d hidden in away, but she wouldn’t dare wear bright red lipstick. But if you hadn’t thought to ask that question, you wouldn’t know that was a thing.
So those types of things, when I read them in a novel, I chuckle to myself and I don’t say anything. I’m not going to contact the author. It’s such a minor thing and there are only three people in the world who will catch it, and most of us know that it’s so minor, it’s not worth it.
Money muddles one reader wouldn’t forgive
Jenny Wheeler: It’s probably possible that once that book is published, one of her readers will tell her that.
Sarah Sundin: Oh gosh, yes. And when I make an error and I make at least one because I’m sure there are way more errors in there that people just aren’t catching or catching and not contacting me, but at least one glaring error in each novel. And that’s God’s way of keeping me humble.
And there was one where I had gotten the conversion of British money, English money at the time, these shillings and pence and it doesn’t make any sense to me as an American at all. I read that’s nonsense. It’s crazy stuff.
And I had found in a book ironically, a book I bought at the Imperial War Museum that had the conversion and I used that.
A British reader of a certain age has contacted me and said, Sarah, I loved your book, however, and I said, I know. I know I got the wrong number of shillings to a crown. most of them are very forgiving.
But I did one reader who said, I can never trust you again. I will never read your books again. I can’t trust you. I felt awful.
I made a mistake and I was thinking how many facts I’d had in that book, and I had one wrong, and I was a little ticked off with that one, but on the other hand, I know how people are and you get something wrong like that and you violate the trust.
I messed that one up. It’s been fixed now in the more recent versions. But yeah, we’re human. We make mistakes, but I try.
What Sarah has planned for next 12 months
Jenny Wheeler: A book from the Imperial War Museum. You might have felt you could trust it.
Look what is next for you as an author. Just give us an idea of what you are working on over the next 12 months.
Sarah Sundin: I just turned in my next novel. It’s set in Scotland during the war, and she is a Dutch refugee who becomes she becomes a German spy to escape.
She thinks that she’s going to ditch the Germans the second she lands in England, but she gets captured immediately by our kilt wearing Scotsman, who is a naval officer, and he turns her in and MI 5 turns her to become a double agent.
She’s immediately set up to Scotland to send false messages back to Germany about British ship movements.
And she’s assigned a naval liaison who is the same man who captured her. It’s been a fun story to write. So that one’s been turned in. I’m waiting for my edits on that. And then I’m getting started on my next book, which will be set in on the island of Jersey during the war.
So that’ll be fun. The Channel Islands
MI 5’s Double Cross spy system
Jenny Wheeler: So that one you’ve just mentioned, what was the nub idea for that? Was there really someone who did come to England as a German spy and then turned.
Sarah Sundin: The MI5 had what they call the Double Cross system and there were about three dozen German spies… I shouldn’t say German because most of them were other nationalities, but they were sent by Germany.
There were Dutch, Norwegians Spaniards, French, Poles, Czechs and Germans. And Belgians.
And they would send them to England. MI 5 actually captured all of the German agents were sent to England except one, and that one ran out of money and committed suicide.
So he did no harm at all, but they would turn them become doubled agents. Those who wouldn’t turn were either imprisoned or executed.
But some of the people, some of the agents who came were like my heroin Cilla, who actually were not Nazis and were using the German Abwehr as a free ticket to England to get out of occupied Europe. There were some that were allied with the Resistance. There were some who were very sketchy.
The nucleus of that idea actually was my youngest son is very much into mythology. And when I told him I wanted to write something set in Scotland, he says, oh mom, you should use some of the mythology. He started telling me about the legend of the silkie, which is mythological creature, which looks like a seal.
But when she comes to land, she strips away her seal skin and she’s a beautiful woman. And the men see her immediately fall in love with her, but she wants to go back to the sea. They can capture her and keep her by hiding her seal skin.
And then she’s trapped on land and she has to stay. And when he told me that story, I was immediately picturing this agent landing at night. Her seal skin is the rubber dinghy that she’s come with. The Scotsman captures her, and by stealing her boat, she’s trapped. But actually, of course I had to make her a sympathetic heroine.
She obviously can’t be a Nazi. She has to be an Allie. The nucleus of that idea this image of this woman landing by boat at night and this man capturing her. And that became the scene that drove that novel. Every novel for me has a big scene that I’m either working toward or that kind of drives the novel, and that was the scene for me.
Where readers can find Sarah Sundin online
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Look, we should now finish because we have run over time. Although it’s been so fascinating, we’d just like to know, do you enjoy interacting with your readers and where can they find you online?
Sarah Sundin: I love hearing from my readers. You can find me on my website sarahsundin.com. Subscribe to my email newsletter. I’m also on Facebook Instagram, Twitter, or X or whatever we’re calling it this week. Come find me.
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much Sarah. It’s been fascinating.
Sarah Sundin: Thanks to you too. Bye.
If you enjoyed Sarah you might also enjoy… Mark Ellis and his Blitz thrillers
Mark Ellis’s World War II London is a place where crime flourishes alongside the heroism of firefighters and fighter pilots and his charismatic Detective Frank Merlin deals with rapists, and racketeers amidst the carnage of falling bombs..
LISTEN TO Mark eLLIS
Next Time on Binge Reading
Amy Harmon grew up in a remote Utah valley very close to where the famed outlaw Butch Cassidy lived, and has always been fascinated by the folk lore surrounding his “Robin Hood” reputation.
She’s far too young to have seen the famous movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford first time round, but she excavated the history and shed a whole new light on the story in her latest book.
The Outlaw Noble Salt is released today, and it’s a remarkable story that one critic “said “imbues the Butch Cassidy myth with even more passion and intrigue” that would have fallen flat if not handled with care. Lucky for readers that Harmon is up to the task.”
That’s next time on Binge Reading… Just a reminder – you can support us by buying me a coffee, and or leaving a review… Word of mouth is still the best way for readers to find books they will love to read.
That’s it for today. See you next time and happy reading.