Q: Our Woman in Moscow takes the reader on a jet-setting ride across Rome, New York, Moscow, and many other glamorous places. It’s the perfect armchair travel in a time when international travel is limited! How did you choose locations? What does that research entail, especially when set in a different time period?

A: I would say that I didn’t really choose the locations—the locations chose me! Like his historical model, Sasha Digby is a foreign service official posted to various high-profile American consulates as his career progresses, ending in his defection to Moscow. Donald Maclean actually met and married his American wife as the Nazis closed in on Paris in the spring of 1940—a dramatic touch any novelist would love—so I couldn’t help recasting this love story in Rome, a city I’ve visited and loved. London has a special place in my heart, both because my father happens to be British by birth, and because my husband and I lived there for five years—in fact, the Digbys’ flat in Oakwood Court was our own, and our downstairs neighbor also complained about her shaking chandeliers when our toddlers thundered down the hall! Moscow was the most challenging location for me, because I’ve never had the opportunity to visit, and of course the Moscow of today differs in so many respects from the Moscow of the immediate postwar Stalinist period. I relied on historical descriptions and travelers’ accounts from the period, and backchecked building histories to account for renovations or location changes.

Q: The novel is not only fantastic historical fiction, but also reads like a spy thriller. Each page contains a piece of the puzzle of why Iris vanished into thin air. How did you create such a gripping thriller in between historical details? Were there any books or movies that helped to inspire you along the way?

A: As I began my research on the Cambridge Spy Ring, the story of the British Foreign Service officer Donald Maclean fascinated me deeply, particularly in glimpses of his turbulent relationship with his American wife, Melinda, and his psychological deterioration under the strain of his double life. Students of the Cambridge Spy Ring will immediately recognize Maclean as the model for Sasha Digby, the fictional American diplomat whose decades-long espionage for the Soviet Union sets in motion the events of Our Woman in Moscow, but the creative influences were various, from Hitchcock classics like The 39 Steps and North by Northwest, to the novels of John le Carré and Graham Greene, to a shattering visit to the Museum of Communism in Prague. Ultimately, I wanted to create a book that combined the narrative momentum of a spy thriller with the texture and the psychological layers of historical fiction, where the storytelling lens shifts to focus on the hidden agency of women.