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Hazel Gaynor is the author of A Memory of Violets and The Girl Who Came Home, for which she received the 2015 RNA Historical Novel of the Year award. She was the recipient of the 2012 Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers and was selected by Library Journal as one of Ten Big Breakout Authors for 2015. Originally from Yorkshire, England, Gaynor now lives in Ireland with her husband and two children. The Girl from the Savoy (Morrow, June 7, 2016) is her third novel.
On your nightstand now:
The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon. Part whodunnit, part coming of age, this is a wonderful book and is taking me right back to my childhood in 1970s England. Loving it.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne. I truly believe that Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore are all alive and well in the Hundred Acre Wood, and refuse to believe anyone who tells me otherwise.
Your top five authors:
Philippa Gregory, Rose Tremain, Jane Austen, Daphne du Maurier and Michael Morpurgo (I read a lot of his books with my kids and they are astonishingly good).
Book you've faked reading:
I've never faked reading a book, but I have tried, and failed (several times) to read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. It still sits on the shelf in hope.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. The title alone is worth being evangelical about! This beautiful little epistolary novel is set on the island of Guernsey in the aftermath of World War II. Full of wonderful characters, wit, warmth and ultimately heartbreaking. I could go on.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I didn't buy it for the cover because I was buying it anyway, but The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton has a beautiful cover. The inside more than lives up to it.
Book you hid from your parents:
Lace by Shirley Conran. I read this as a teenager (no idea where I got hold of it). Fifty Shades was but a twinkle in E.L. James's eye back then!
Book that changed your life:
I'm not sure it changed my life (my kids did that), but Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights certainly had a profound impact on me. I read it as a teenager, and it was the first piece of classic English literature I'd read for pleasure, rather than because it was on the school syllabus. I grew up in Yorkshire, not too far from Haworth, and the moors where the Brontës lived so I suppose part of me understood the landscape. I've re-read it many times since.
Favorite line from a book:
"Reader, I married him," from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Five books you'll never part with:
A signed copy of The Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes, a signed copy of The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory, Pride & Prejudice (scribbled in the margins from its time as my English Literature textbook), The House at Pooh Corner (see above) and Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Harris, for its quiet brilliance.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Book with the most memorable character:
Robert Merivel from the novels Restoration and Merivel by Rose Tremain. Merivel is a 17th-century English physician who works his way into the court of King Charles II. He is such a brilliant character. I often think about him and his badger-fur tabard (you'd have to read the book!)