KATE QUINN

The American historical fiction writer picks five books that showed her how the genre could be full of everyday life, humour, and humanity

Photo by Laura Jucha Photography

My latest book The Briar Club came together out of a pandemic-year mishmash of inspirations: a Laurie Colwin essay, an Instagram photo, a Japanese Netflix series, and a random historical factoid. In ‘Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant’ from the book Home Cooking, food writer Laurie Colwin wrote humorously about her years as a broke twentysomething in a placemat-sized apartment in New York City, managing to feed her equally broke friends from a kitchenette consisting of a mini-fridge and a hot-plate. I reread that essay during the pandemic, quietly whimpering – I’d have happily cooked on a hot-plate and drained spaghetti in my bathtub if I could be surrounded by loved ones, scraped plates, and half-empty bottles of wine. ‘Could this be a book?’ I thought. ‘Stranger comes to town, pulls housemates together with weekly dinners in her tiny apartment?’ Felt like pretty low stakes for a Kate Quinn book, though; nobody getting bombed, arrested, or shot.

But the idea wouldn’t go away. It kept talking to me when I stumbled across an Instagram photo of a glorious green-walled room painted with vines and flowers: the belfry room in the Sleeper-McCann house in Massachusetts, if you’re interested in Googling it. ‘That’s the room,’ I thought. ‘The mysterious newcomer paints the vine when she arrives!’ The idea really came to life when I started Netflix’s Midnight Diner, where an enigmatic Tokyo cook observes the problems of a series of clients to his nighttime cafe: ‘Each chapter could be a different woman in the boarding house – and there could be recipes!’