I write novels the way a filmmaker builds a set.

My name is Hannah Byron, and my stories are rooted in the hidden lives of women who moved through occupied Europe during the Second World War, couriers, spies, resistance fighters, and the modern women drawn back into their shadows. History is my raw material, but atmosphere is everything. What I’m after is courage, elegance, danger, and the quiet thrill of secrets well kept.

Paris sits at the centre of my imagination. I was born there, to a British mother and a Dutch father, and grew up moving between France, the UK, and Holland. Europe shaped my eye early, through its languages, its borders, and its cultural contrasts. That sensibility runs through all my work. As a result, my novels are mainly set in Western Europe, in places where my own past presses close and where the major tensions of the old continent are never quite resolved.

Before becoming a full-time novelist, I worked as a university professor and translator. Research has never been optional for me. I read original SOE archive files, trace wartime routes, and return to the landscapes my characters once crossed. I’m interested not only in what happened, but in what was never written down, the texture of women’s lives lived under pressure, the choices made by female hearts in rooms with the curtains drawn.

These days, I think of my work less as publishing books and more as directing a series of long-form projects. Each novel is a film in the same broad universe, spanning the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first. At the end of every book, I step out from behind the scenes to talk to readers about how my latest project was made, the research, the discoveries, the questions that refused to let go. My newsletter is my coffee table, the place where I share field notes, archival fragments, travel updates, and the parts of my author life that don’t fit anywhere else.

If you’re here, you’re likely drawn to stories with atmosphere, intelligence, and a glint of secrecy. The kind that linger. The kind you won’t find anywhere else. As if written for your eyes only.

Welcome.