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Natasha Lester is a New York Times and USA today best-selling author of historical fiction. She’s a master storyteller who loves nothing better than creating strong, daring and enigmatic leading women.
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and Natasha talks about the remarkable, true life stories of the woman who underlined her timeline series in the latest Binge Reading episode, women like Catherine Dior, the sister of her much more famous brother, Christian Dior, the fashion designer, who was with the French resistance during World War II.
We’ve got three eBook copies of Natasha’s latest World War II thriller The Paris Secret to give away to three lucky readers. Enter here. You’ll find the show notes for this episode, links to Natasha’s books, plus details about how to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t ever have to be without a great book you can’t put down.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- The catalyst that got Natasha started writing
- Why finding her niche took time
- Her passion for all things French
- The fashion designer’s intrepid sister
- How a mascara mystery got her hooked
- What she’s working on next
Where to find Natasha Lester:
Website: https://www.natashalester.com.au/
Facebook: @natashalesterauthor
Twitter: @natasha_lester
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natashalesterauthor/
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Introducing Natasha Lester – Author
Jenny Wheeler: So now here’s Natasha. Hello there, Natasha and welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you with us.
Natasha Lester: It’s my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Jenny Wheeler: Was there a Once Upon a Time moment, some epiphany when you decided I really do want to write fiction and if I don’t do it, I’ll have left something undone that’s very important to me. And if so, what was the catalyst?
Natasha Lester: I did always want to be a writer when I was young. I wrote all the time. My mum has various samples of books and poems and stories that I wrote right from the time that I learned to write, right through my childhood and adolescence.
But I guess the thing that stopped me from becoming a writer at that time was that I didn’t know how to become a writer. When I left high school there weren’t creative writing degrees available at university and so I didn’t understand how I could become a writer other than to just sit down and write and I didn’t know how to do that.
So I didn’t take the plunge back then. In fact I did a Commerce degree at university and I worked in Marketing for about 10 or 12 years. I ended up in Melbourne working for L’Oréal Paris as Marketing Manager for the Maybelline brand of cosmetics, which was a lot of fun for a woman in her twenties. I had lots of lipstick, more than I could ever have worn in my lifetime.
Taking the plunge into writing
Then we had to come back to Perth. My husband had come to Melbourne with me for my job, and then he had to come back to Perth for his job. It meant quitting my job at L’Oréal and suddenly this moment of opportunity opened up for me where I didn’t have a job, I could do something different if I just took the plunge. So I did take the plunge.
Rather than getting another job back in Perth, I went back to university and enrolled in a Creative Writing degree because they existed then. That was the moment. I had this dream of being a writer but I wanted to find out whether I was any good at being a writer and also if I would actually enjoy it. Doing a university degree helped me to work out the answer to both of those things, which was, thankfully, a resounding ‘Yes’. I guess that was the moment when it all began to happen for me.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful, and you have enjoyed great success. You most definitely have proven that you do have what it takes. You’ve been making the New York Times best seller list with a number of your books. How did you decide to write in this particular niche that you are enjoying big success in – the historical fiction genre? How did you make that decision?
Natasha Lester: It was a little bit of an accident. I always wish, when I answer these questions, that I could sound as if I was more organized than I actually am. But I do think sometimes your subconscious maybe directs you to where you ought to go. I published two books early on that were contemporary fiction, so they weren’t historical.
Learning by doing
After that I wrote a third book in a similar vein to those two which was contemporary fiction, and I didn’t enjoy the writing process in that book. I would get to my desk every day and feel like, oh gosh, I’ve got to sit down and write this book again.
I made myself get to the end of the first draft because I like to finish something when I start it. But I knew when I got there that it was a book that I didn’t really like. It wasn’t working, I didn’t know how to fix it and, most importantly,
I didn’t actually want to fix it. I didn’t have the urge to make it better. So I threw the entire first draft, 85,000 words, into the bin. Then I sat down in a chair in my study and sulked a little bit, but also, and this was the important thing, I pulled off my bookshelves all of my favorite books.
I sat and I re-read all of those for about a month and in doing that, I realized that so many of them were historical fiction. I’d always loved historical fiction but I’d never really thought about the fact that I did love it, probably above all other genres.
I’d had an idea bubbling away in the back of my mind for some time which was to do with a historical storyline about a woman trying to become one of the first female obstetricians in 1920’s New York and I’d ignored it because it was so completely unrelated to all the other contemporary novels I’d published, but that process of failing at that manuscript, sitting in a chair and reading those books gave me the courage to try.
So I sat down, started to write the story, which eventually became my first historical novel, A Kiss For Mr. Fitzgerald, and I loved every minute of that writing process. That was so much fun. I truly enjoyed it. I couldn’t wait to get to my desk and start writing. It was then that I realized that was what I was meant to do. It just took me a little while to get there.
Moving into WW II
Jenny Wheeler: The one that you’ve most recently got published is The Paris Secret. I think that was out earlier this year, wasn’t it?
Natasha Lester: Yes, that’s right. The end of March.
Jenny Wheeler: That combines two very fascinating story worlds. You’ve got the World War II espionage scene and Paris high fashion, particularly the House of Dior. I noticed that in some of your other books too, you have a great molding of both fictional and non-fictional elements. The Dior element is a great part of the nonfictional element. Tell us how you develop that interest in combining the historical and the contemporary in a way that makes it really come alive.
Natasha Lester: Again, I did this a bit by accident. I wish I could say that all these things were planned ideas, but they weren’t. I was writing The Paris Seamstress. That was a book that came out in 2018. It began as a purely historical novel and I wrote myself into something of a corner.
I had the historical storyline unfold and there was this mystery in the storyline. Then I got to a certain point in the story where literally all my characters were poised on their cliffhangers and I didn’t know what to do with them. I couldn’t work out how to resolve the mystery, how to get them down off their cliffhangers and wrap the story up.
It took me a good month or so to work that out. It’s a very random story. It wasn’t until I flew to Adelaide for a conference and on the airplane I watched a documentary about Tiffany & Co., the jewelry store. Then in my hotel room that night, I suddenly had this vision unspooling before me of a contemporary storyline involving the main character, Estella, who was in the historical storyline, her granddaughter.
Midnight inspiration
She’d never had a granddaughter up until that moment in time. And there was this connection to Tiffany, the jewelry store, which obviously had come from my watching this documentary. I realized at 3am in my Adelaide hotel room that including a contemporary storyline into the novel would solve all my problems.
I’d be able to get all my characters down off the cliff hangers and to tie the story up. Luckily my publisher was in Adelaide with me and I had breakfast with her the next day and ran the idea past her of turning the book into a dual narrative and she thought it sounded like a great idea.
So I just went ahead and did it. Luckily it worked out and readers seemed to really like that blending of historical and contemporary and so I have done that ever since with my books because I really like the way in which you can show how the legacy of something like war continues on for decades afterwards and affects people in ways that you would never know until you start to get under the surface.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. It’s interesting that there are quite strong parallels in the story lines, it sounds, between The Paris Seamstress and The Paris Secret. In that one, you’ve got a Sydney conservator, Kat Jourdan, a contemporary character who discovers a mysterious cache of Dior dresses in her grandmother’s wardrobe and the story very lovingly details the Dior dresses. I wondered if Dior was already a passion of yours before you started writing the book.
A passion for Dior fashion
Natasha Lester: Oh, absolutely. I’ve always adored Christian Dior’s gowns. There has probably only been a couple of designers who have utterly transformed fashion and he was definitely one of them. Being a lover of fashion history anyway, Dior has always been someone whose clothes I have absolutely adored. The reason though that Christian Dior came into the book was because I wanted to write about Catherine Dior, his sister. She was the initial inspiration for the book.
As I realized that she was going to be a character in the book and what a fascinating backstory she had, then the Christian Dior link popped in. It’s probably the only time Christian’s ever played second fiddle in his life, but he certainly did in my thinking of the book. He came second after Catherine.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Her story seems to have come to the fore a little bit more in recent years. I must admit I didn’t know anything about it until I read your book, but she was a member of the French Resistance and she got put into Ravensbruck, the concentration camp that they took female prisoners to towards the end of the war. When did you first become aware of her involvement in that war?
The designer’s less famous sister
Natasha Lester: I read about Catherine Dior in a book called Les Parisiennes by an historian called Anne Sebba. It’s a wonderful book about the role of French women during the Second World War, both those who worked with the Resistance and those who collaborated with the Germans. Anne Sebba mentions Catherine Dior in that book two or three times, just in passing, but there was enough in there for me to glean that Catherine did work for the French Resistance and that she was captured by the Nazis and deported to Ravensbruck and that she’s one of the very lucky few who survived that dreadful experience at that concentration camp.
Her work for the Resistance had been so important that she was awarded a Legion d’Honneur by the French and Croix de Guerre and the British awarded her as well because of her work with the Resistance. I just couldn’t believe that she was so heroic, she risked her life quite literally for freedom and nobody has ever heard of her.
Brother & sister at war
But we all know about Christian, her brother who made beautiful dresses, whereas arguably Catherine is probably the more heroic of two Dior siblings. The moment I read about her in that book, I knew that I wanted to include her in a story some way down the track.
It was probably in about early 2017 that I read that and I always like an idea to kind of fester in my mind for about six months before I begin seriously researching and writing. So the germ of The Paris Secret was born from that.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s remarkable that the brother and sister were involved in such different ways, because I don’t think you could be a designer in Paris during the Nazi occupation and not to some degree or other become, even if it was reluctantly, a collaborator. Were they aware of what each was doing at that time or did they only discover after the war?
Natasha Lester: Christian was aware of what his sister was doing. Christian was working for another designer called Lucien Lelong during the war. Lucien was the head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. He fought during the war against the Nazis to try to keep the couture industry in Paris.
The Germans wanted to move it to Germany. Christian was working with Lucien Lelong who was trying to do his best to save Paris’s fashion industry, but he was also aware of what Catherine was doing. He used to let Catherine and her people who were in her Resistance group use his apartment for their meetings because it was deemed to be a reasonably safe space for them to meet.
Birth of the perfume Miss Dior
It’s not on any historical record that I can find, how much he knew. I suspect he would allow her to meet there but wouldn’t have known about the details of what she was doing, because it was just too risky for anyone in the Resistance to tell anyone else about what they were up to in case that other person was captured and interrogated and then would perhaps give up all the details and put other people’s lives at risk.
I suspect that beyond loaning her the apartment, she wouldn’t have told him very much about what she was doing, but he was aware she was helping in her wonderful way.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. It’s rather nice to learn that he named that very famous perfume, Miss Dior, that he launched in 1947, for Catherine didn’t he?
Natasha Lester: Yes, that was so lovely. He adored his sister and one of the pieces of research that I found when I was researching the book was the letter that he wrote to his father in April, 1945, when he’d just heard that Catherine had been released from Ravensbruck and that she was making her way back across to France.
You can see in the letter how relieved he is because he had written many, many letters during the war, during 1944, to try to find out where Catherine was and then to try to have her released from the camp. They had all been unsuccessful until right near the end of the war when things were falling apart from the Germans.
So, yes, I think that his tribute to her is quite lovely, even though the name of the perfume was a bit of an accident, but I think it was a happy accident and one that he was very proud of in the end because the perfume’s a very floral scent and Catherine became a flower seller in Paris after the war.
The French Photographer
I apologize if there’s noise in the background here. A massive rainstorm has just started pouring on my roof, so I hope that you can still hear me alright.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I can, there’s a slight dull thudding. Maybe that’s the rain on the roof.
One of the other books – I am listening to an edition of it called The French Photographer, but I think it also has been published under the title of The Paris Orphan in some countries hasn’t it?
Natasha Lester: Yes, that’s right. It was published in America as The Paris Orphan, but everywhere else it’s The French Photographer.
Jenny Wheeler: That one also has the same great combination of nitty gritty and flair because you’ve got a Vogue photographer who goes to Europe as a war photographer. That one also has a real ring of original sources about it. You mentioned the research that you did – the battle scenes and this one where she gets left hiding in a ditch under assault at one stage – ring very true. Tell me a little about the research that you’ve done.
Natasha Lester: For the Paris Secret or the French Photographer?
Jenny Wheeler: The French Photographer.
Natasha Lester: For The French Photographer I buried myself in all of the different reports written by the female correspondents during the Second World War because I was writing about a woman who was a female photojournalist for Vogue.
I wanted to read what the females had written at that time about the different things they reported on. Then I sat down and read lots of reports from the male correspondents.
Women reporting from the front
It was really interesting to me, the quite stark differences between not just the subject matter, because of course the women weren’t allowed near the front line for a very long time and so I couldn’t report on things like battle, but also the way in which they wrote about the aftermath of battle and the details that they would notice. There’s a particularly moving piece by a reporter called Iris Carpenter who came upon a town in France that had just been liberated by the Allies.
It was left in ruins and out the front of the town there was a dead American soldier kind of propped up against a fence with a bunch of geraniums blooming next to him and a rabbit hopping across him. She talks about it as being like this dreadful surrealist kind of composition.
This poor American soldier had died to liberate a town whose name he would never have even heard of most likely, but he’d given up his life for it.
A woman’s view of war
It was those kinds of details in the women’s reports that for me brought home the emotional reality of war over and above the men’s, which were more typically blow by blow battle descriptions.
But I also made sure I went to Normandy for instance and I stood on Omaha beach, which was a very powerful experience for me. And there are many museums through Normandy that were very helpful in the research. There’s one dedicated to the paratroopers for instance, and one of the male characters in The French Photographer is a paratrooper and being a non-military person, I didn’t know much about what they would do.
Being able to wander through an entire museum with all the different artifacts belonging to the paratroopers and the entire story of them, seeing the 80 kilograms of equipment that they would carry as I jumped out of a plane, was a great way for me to learn. I like that visual experience more so than reading about their experiences in a book.
I always find it’s really important to go to the sites you’re going to write about, particularly when you’re writing about something like D-day and Omaha beach, to make sure that you can as accurately as possible convey not just the physical setting but the emotions behind that setting.
A deep affection for French culture
Jenny Wheeler: What also does come through, even when you’re talking about it, is a deep affection for France and French culture. Where did that spring from?
Natasha Lester: I think it sprang from my learning the French language in high school for five years. I took French all the way through high school and I had a bit of an aptitude for the language. I fell in love with the language first and of course while you’re studying French, you do learn a lot about the country and I loved all of that. One of the first places I went to when I had enough money to backpack around Europe was France, and I loved it in reality as much as I had loved reading about it and learning about it.
I continued my French language classes and then I worked for a French company. L’Oréal was a French company. That gave me a lot more exposure to all things French. I think the love has been from being that 13 year old in high school, learning the language and then everything else that attaches to that.
So yes, I do love France and I was scheduled in fact to be there in about two weeks’ time but of course that’s not happening anymore for the reason of COVID-19. I’ll miss visiting there and and I hope that the situation over there improves for all of them.
Jenny Wheeler: You obviously have an affinity for it. Turning to your wider career, perhaps just taking the focus away from the individual books, you’ve mentioned about your glamorous sounding career with L’Oréal and I wonder, has that helped you with your writing and in what ways might it have influenced some of the choices you’ve made?
Mascara anecdotes
Natasha Lester: In a couple of ways. In fact, my second historical novel called Her Mother’s Secret was about the birth of the cosmetics industry in the early part of the 20th century. That all came about because of a bit of an apocryphal story, I guess, that I’d heard at L’Oréal about the invention of the first Maybelline mascara, which was the very first mascara ever made.
The story goes that there was a young woman called Mabel and she was going out on a date that night and she wanted to look her best and so she was using what women used at that time in 1917 to darken their lashes, which was lamp black, like soot, from a candle or a lamp.
Her brother Tom walked past and he saw her doing this and he said to her, oh, there must be a better way than that. He mixed the lamp black with Vaseline to create this more greasy substance that would adhere better to the lashes. From that moment on mascara was invented and Maybelline became a reality and it was called Maybelline because it was a combination of Mable’s name plus the word Vaseline.
I thought, that’s the most amazing story, when I heard that at L’Oréal. That had been in my mind and wanting to come out and it did in Her Mother’s Secret. But also, I guess on a more practical level, having worked in marketing for companies like that who do marketing so well has been hugely beneficial because writers are expected to do such a lot of their own marketing these days.
Strong enigmatic characters
I enjoy the marketing side of things and I learned quite a lot about it, which has been very useful to me as a writer to be able to employ those techniques in social media, et cetera.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. Did you discover if there was any truth in that apocryphal story?
Jenny Wheeler: Well, it’s pretty much the first story you hear the minute you start working at L’Oréal and it’s talked about with such reverence. If it is true, and it is circulated on the internet, but who knows? I’d love to believe that it was true although I hate the fact that it was a man who invented mascara. I wish it had been Mabel who thought of mixing Vaseline up with the lamp black.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, because you love your female characters to be strong, independent and enigmatic, don’t you?
Jenny Wheeler: I do. I do!
Jenny Wheeler: If there’s one thing that you’ve done perhaps more than any other, that you would credit as the secret of your success, what would it be?
Natasha Lester: I think recognizing that to write a book, you actually have to sit down and write. I know that sounds a bit silly, but it’s using any available space of time to do the writing.
The secret of writing success
So many people want to write a book, but don’t want to do the work of writing a book. For me, that really hit home when I had my first child in 2006. That was the point at which I was writing my very first book and six months after she was born, I realized that I hadn’t written a single word in that whole time that she’d been alive and I could very easily see that things would continue like that.
The baby would continue to take up all of my time and all of my energy and that I wouldn’t write ever again. That very day I decided that every time she went down to have a sleep I would write, and it wouldn’t matter if it was 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, two hours, whatever time was available, I would just write.
That was the way I wrote my first few books, because for at least the first four or five, I had kids at home with me. That was the best. I hated it at the time. I thought it was this dreadful kind of pressure, but looking back, it was the best writing training experience I’ve ever had because it taught me not to waste time because I didn’t have time to waste.
Natasha as reader – some favorites
It taught me that it doesn’t matter how much time you have. If you write any amount of words on any given day, that will all add up to being a final polished book at the end of the day. That’s my big piece of advice to anyone. Don’t wait for the muse. The muse will come to you if you make time for it. To write a book, you have to sit down and write.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. This is The Joys of Binge Reading, so turning to Natasha as reader, you mentioned your taste in historical fiction. Tell us a little bit about the books that you’ve liked to binge read perhaps in the past and currently.
Natasha Lester: I’ve always been a big fan of Jane Eyre. That’s probably one of my traditional favorites. I also have always been a fan of Margaret Atwood. Her book The Blind Assassin would be one of my absolute favorite books on my shelf, which interestingly has that dual or multiple narrative going through it, with past and contemporary and newspaper clippings and all kinds of things happening in that book.
More recently books that I have read and enjoyed have been Gulliver’s Wife by another Australian historical fiction author called Lauren Chater, whose books I’ve always loved. I recently read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I had been putting it off because of the sheer size of it and I read it and absolutely loved it and could see what all the fuss was about instantaneously. It’s always lovely when you read a much-hyped book and enjoy it too.
Greek myth retold
Another book I love to recommend to everyone is Circe by Madeline Miller. It sounds a bit strange, it’s a retelling of the myth of the Greek nymph Circe, but it’s the most exquisitely written feminist incredible book that I’ve come across in a long time.
Jenny Wheeler: I’m just curious, those books that you picked off your own bookshelf when you were trying to decide what you’d write next, who were some of those authors?
Natasha Lester: I did re-read The Blind Assassin. I also re-read A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which I have long loved. Ian McEwan’s Atonement was another one that I immersed myself in for several days because again, I’ve always loved that book, the twist at the end, there’s nothing has punched me in the gut quite as hard as that book did. Those are a few of the ones that sat by my side while I was moping and reading.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. They’re all quite literary fiction aren’t they? Rather than genre fiction.
Natasha Lester: Yes, I guess so, although I don’t really tend to differentiate it that much. To me, a historical novel is a historical novel. That kind of distinction, I don’t follow that much.
Jenny Wheeler: The boundaries between literary and genre are narrowing by the day, when you think about people like Kate Atkinson who writes standalones and police procedurals or mystery thrillers as well.
Natasha Lester: Absolutely. Her book A God in Ruins is another one that I had next to me. I adored that book. It’s an incredible work of historical fiction.
Jenny Wheeler: Circling around and looking back down the tunnel of time, where you’ve come from and where you are today, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything that you would change looking back?
What she’d change – if anything
Natasha Lester: I don’t think so. It’s tempting to say I wouldn’t have wasted my time writing that third book and throwing it in the bin, but if I hadn’t done that then maybe I wouldn’t have decided to start writing historical fiction and I can never regret something like that.
I think I probably would want to tell myself that, because there were many times, in the early years particularly, when I thought why am I doing this? I could be earning so much more money working in marketing and I would be wearing much nicer clothes as well. I wouldn’t be sitting around in my track suit pants bashing away at the keyboard.
There were moments when I really thought that it wasn’t worth continuing because it does take a number of years to start earning anything that could be called money from writing. Maybe I would look back at that version of myself and reassure her that yes, it was worth continuing and be patient, the rewards do come in the end, so long as you’re doing what you love, which I was.
Jenny Wheeler: There’s been a question at the back of my mind, you mentioning sitting around in tracksuit pants. Have you ever managed to buy a Dior?
Natasha Lester: I do have a 1970’s Dior. That’s about as early as I can afford. I’ve got this one amazing website called 1stdibs which is where you can go online and buy vintage clothing.
Shopping for vintage Dior
There are some incredible early 1950’s Dior pieces on there, but they’re all like $30,000 so I think it’s going to be a little while before I can afford to add one of those to my collection. But that would be my ideal dream, to find one, some way, that someone’s vastly underpriced and to snap it up. Particularly something that Dior himself had designed, so between 1947 and 1957. That’s my one writing dream.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s a motivator to keep you writing best sellers, isn’t it?
Natasha Lester: That’s right, yes.
Jenny Wheeler: What is next for Natasha, the writer? What are the projects that you’ve got on at the moment and looking into 2021?
Natasha Lester: For 2021 I’ll have another book coming out. It has a working title of The Riviera House. I’m not entirely sure what it will be called when it’s published. That’s coming out in September 2021, which is a different publication date for me.
Normally my books come out in April, but we’re moving into that kind of pre-Christmas slot which is great for me because it’s quite challenging to write a long work of historical fiction each year. Having 18 months between books, I needed a bit of a break and a bit of a relax so that’s been quite lovely. We’re working on the edits for that book now so it’s in its final phases.
What’s next for Natasha
I’m also playing around with the first draft of a book for 2022 which is proving to be quite a lot of fun. I’m enjoying that a lot. So there are books for at least a couple more years yet.
Jenny Wheeler: The one that’s coming out next year, can you give us any hints about the timeframe and the setting? Is that also World War II and Europe?
Natasha Lester: Sure. It is World War II. This is about another incredible woman who again I first read about in Anne Sebba’s book Les Parisiennes and I thought she deserves a story of her own. I’m loving the fact that I’m unearthing her from the bowels of history and hopefully bringing her back to people’s attention.
The historical storyline is set all in Paris during the Second World War, and there’s also a contemporary storyline in that book which is mostly set on the French Riviera in a beautiful town called Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.
Where to find Natasha on social
It was quite lovely to immerse myself in that book and imagine myself in that gorgeous Riviera town for the entire duration of the writing.
Jenny Wheeler: Here’s hoping that it won’t be too long before you’ll be able to go back to France.
Natasha Lester: Yes.
Jenny Wheeler: By 2021, probably.
Natasha Lester: Yes.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s been great talking. I’m sure that your readers love to contact you. Where can they find you online?
Natasha Lester: They can find me all over social media pretty much. Mostly I’m on Instagram and Facebook at Natasha Lester author so that’s probably the best place to come and find me. Also my website is natashalester.com.au if they want to find out more specifically about any of my books.
Getting to know readers
Jenny Wheeler: Do you have much interaction with your readers?
Natasha Lester: I do. I love my readers. They are the shining moments of joy in a day when the writing seems really tough because they are constantly sending me beautiful messages, having read The Paris Secret and writing to tell me how much they loved it. I just adore receiving those because they really do lift you up at times when you often need it. I’m incredibly lucky to have a very big loyal readership who loves to chat and get me through my writing process.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s beautiful. I think that covers it all beautifully. We’ve run out of time, so thank you so much for being with us today.
Natasha Lester: It was my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
If you enjoyed Natasha’s World War II dual time line stories you may also enjoy fellow Australian author Christine Wells World War II spy stories or Deanna Raybourn’s Expect the Unexpected.
Thanks To Our Technical Support:
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