Natasha Lester | Author

Natasha Lester

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25.01.2022 Would anyone like to win a signed copy of THE PARIS SECRET?! Given it's been such a strange year, any good things are definitely worth celebrating and the last month since the publication of THE PARIS SECRET in North America has been pretty good for me so I thought I'd try to pass on some of that goodness by giving away a couple of books! I have one signed copy of THE PARIS SECRET to give away to a North American reader and one signed copy of THE PARIS SECRET to give away to ...an Australian/New Zealand reader. All you need to do to be in the running to win is leave a comment below telling me about one good thing that's happened to you this year. And make sure you tell me if you're from North America or ANZ. For each friend you tag, you'll receive an extra entry. Giveaway is open to anyone who likes my Facebook page and who leaves a comment as per above. The two winners will be drawn by random number generator and informed via Facebook Messenger. Entries close 12 noon, Oct 18 AWST. This giveaway is not affiliated with Facebook in any way. Good luck!

23.01.2022 Another dress from the mystery wardrobe of Dior gowns that Kat, one of the main characters in THE PARIS SECRET, finds hiding in her grandmother's abandoned cottage in Cornwall. This is from 1956 and it’s called Eventail. Kat wears it during a very important scene in the book, in honour of her grandmother. The dress has a gorgeous print but what I love about it most is the fan at the front of the dress, opening out from the waist. The dress was part of Dior's Aimant line, a ...romantic collection of dresses that use motifs from eighteenth century court life - hence the fan. Eventail, the dress’s name, means fan. I took this picture at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, where I found the dress and knew immediately it would have to go in the book: the Liberty print roses were a sign it had to be included - and if you’ve read the book, you’ll know why! See more

19.01.2022 I don't think I could love this any more - this is a snapshot of the Top 100 at Barnes & Noble from overnight. It's the only time in my life I'll ever get to rub shoulders with Barack Obama so I'm going to enjoy it!

18.01.2022 It's a good thing I'm going out to dinner tonight because I have lots to celebrate! THE PARIS SECRET moved up to No. 8 on the Trade Paperback Bestsellers list this week! Huge thank you to all of my wonderful North American readers for buying, reading and recommending the book - I have loved receiving all of your messages and I truly appreciate your support. I'll be raising a glass of champagne to you tonight! Have a wonderful weekend everyone! https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/nielsen/tradepaper.html

16.01.2022 Book recommendation!! As you can see from the pic, I'm a big Maggie O'Farrell fan anyway (thanks Sara Foster - Author for putting me onto her all those years ago!) but I've just read her latest, Hamnet, and it's her best book ever! She's taken the story of the childhood death of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, and turned it into the most beautiful story. Shakespeare himself is almost a minor character in the book, which focuses on his wife and children. It's stunningly written and I highly recommend adding it to your tbr pile!

14.01.2022 I wish there'd been something like this around when I started out as a writer! Coming in early 2021 from Fremantle Press, How to Be An Author covers anything and everything that prospective writers need to know about writing a book, publishing a book, publicising a book and lots more. Some amazing authors have contributed their knowledge to the book - including yours truly! - and Fremantle Press publisher Georgia Richter and Creative Writing lecturer Deborah Hunn have written the rest. It's honestly a brilliant resource and if I was a newish writer, someone who wanted to be a writer, or a writer at the start of my career, I would be immersing myself in the pages. You can find out more about the book here: https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/produ/how-to-be-an-author Definitely add it to your tbr for 2021!

13.01.2022 Today only - THE PARIS SECRET eBook is just $3.99! It's never been discounted before, and it's only available at this price for one day, so grab a copy and escape to Paris while you can! You can buy the ebook for just $3.99 at Amazon right now by clicking this link: https://amzn.to/2LdNJGa Happy reading! (Amazon US customers only)

12.01.2022 Imagine flying an open-cockpit aeroplane, exposed to the elements, for four hours to Scotland in winter in minus thirty degrees wind-chill. THE PARIS SECRET is about a lot more than fashion and Paris - it's also about a brave group of female pilots who survived thousands of flights like that. Skye Penrose, the main character in The Paris Secret, is a pilot for the Air Transport Auxiliary, a wartime organisation that transported RAF planes around England. Skye is a fictional c...reation but much of what she does in the book is based on fact. And the fact was: the ATA women risked their lives for their jobs. They flew planes using only a compass & railway tracks to guide them. They had no navigation instruments, no radio to call in if they lost their way or if their plane experienced mechanical problems. Because they needed to follow railway tracks, they had to stay in sight of the ground & were told only to fly if the cloud base was eight hundred feet or higher. But English weather isn’t predictable. So many pilots set out on what appeared to be a fine day. Then the weather changed & they were stuck in a thick layer of cloud, unable to see. The pilots died crashing into hills, or by running out of fuel and falling into the sea. Sometimes they were even shot at by the Luftwaffe. Getting back to those sub-zero flights to Scotland: when the women landed, their bodies were so frozen they couldn’t move. Mortifyingly, they had to be lifted out of their planes by male engineers. The RAF tried to use it as evidence that the women couldn’t do the job, despite fact that not even a man could stand up after enduring such a flight. But the ATA women kept going, flying 2,000 planes to Scotland over one long, cold winter. I loved writing about aviatrix Skye in The Paris Secret and was lucky to visit the National Archives in Kew, where the ATA papers are kept. Here you can see some of the photos from that research. I hope you enjoy learning about Skye and the female ATA pilots in THE PARIS SECRET as much as I loved writing about them.

12.01.2022 Another one of the dresses in the wardrobe of 65 Dior gowns in The Paris Secret is the Zelie cocktail dress from 1954. There's an absolutely fascinating story behind this dress: Nat King Cole's wife owned the Zelie now held by the NGV in Melbourne. The conservators there were fascinated by the small but perfect peplum at the back of the dress and wanted to know how it had been constructed. So they took an X-ray of the dress, which you can see in the second image, and discover...ed a series of lead weights sewn into the bottom of the peplum (the large white dots in the second image) and some seriously heavy duty boning! I know from having looked inside a couple of Dior pieces at the Powerhouse museum that the lead weights were a feature of Dior, but the ones in Zelie are sewn between the lining and the exterior, rather than into little covered pouches like the ones I've seen. There's so much going on under all that silk in a Dior gown! Not to mention the six petticoats built into the dress to give it that perfect shape. I didn't know the X-ray story before I chose the dress to go into The Paris Secret but, when I uncovered it, it made me love the dress even more. I hope you enjoy that little history! In the first image you can find the quote from The Paris Secret in which Zelie makes her appearance - I wanted to include some of the more understated dresses in the book, rather than only selecting the extravagant ballgowns. And of course Kat wears the dress in the book - I would too if I owned it! If you want to know more, the article referencing the X-ray can be found online: https://www.smh.com.au//christian-dior-at-ngv-inside-the-a) See more

11.01.2022 I have two final virtual events to go, which I'm really looking forward to! First up I'll be appearing at Hachette's annual Book Club Brunch on a panel with Emma Donoghue and Attica Locke - I'll be the one doing some serious fangirling at this! Oct 17 at 10.30am ET. Tickets available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hachettes-book-club-brunch-a-d You can also catch me in conversation with Kerri Maher, author of The Girl in the White Gloves, hosted by Cary Memorial Library on October 19 at 7.30pm ET. We'll be chatting about France, Grace Kelly, amazing women from history, fashion and lots more! Book your spot here: https://tinyurl.com/CaryLibrary

11.01.2022 It's been a big year for international translations of my books, with editions now available, or forthcoming in Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Albania, Croatia, Czech, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, Russia! Wow! I still can't believe that my books are actually being read all over the world. I'm often asked which books are available in which country and it's a very good question! So here's a little video that will show you the books that are currently available, or to be released very soon, in the different countries. The best way to stay up to date is to keep an eye on the International page of my website, which is always being updated. I hope you enjoy seeing all the different covers for the different territories! https://www.natashalester.com.au/international/

09.01.2022 I've had some more international translations published recently - I love that my books are available in so many languages now! It's such a buzz to see people posting reviews about your book in another language, one that you can't read and must therefore simply believe is a good review! Here are the covers for the Norwegian translation of The Paris Seamstress, now available from Strawberry Publishing https://strawberrypublishing.no/produkt/syersken-fra-paris/ And the cover for The Paris Secret, now available in Italian from Newton Compton editori: https://www.newtoncompton.com/libro/il-segreto-di-dior

09.01.2022 So there I was, flicking through my newly arrived May 1947 edition of Harper's Bazaar, admiring the illustration of Dior's Bar Suit, when I saw this ad: "Coronet Vibrator With Patting Action." And I just about spat out my tea because there is NO WAY that the item we now know as a vibrator would have been advertised in Harper's Bazaar back in 1947. I then read the ad copy and realised it was a face massager but you can see why the text in the black box in the corner combined with the picture of the woman in the ad had me wondering!!! I could not stop laughing!!! So if you find a Coronet Vibrator With Patting Action in my next book, you'll know where it came from!!!

09.01.2022 I've been receiving lots of messages from readers who are equally as fascinated by the story of Catherine Dior, Resistance heroine and Christian Dior's sister. Catherine appears as a character in THE PARIS SECRET and I loved writing about her and bringing her amazing life to people's notice. If you'd like to know more about how I researched her life, where I travelled to, what I found out about her in different museums around the world, I've written this blog post for you. I hope you enjoy it! https://www.natashalester.com.au/on-the-trail-of-catherine/

06.01.2022 So this is what I've been working on over the last few days - the synopsis/proposal for my 2023 book. Yes, I really am thinking that far ahead! I normally hate this part of the writing process because I usually don't really know what story I'm writing but I've done a bit of planning this time and I'm really liking this proposal - can't wait to write it, in fact. Hopefully my agent and publishers will like it too! And I know it's teasing to only show you the working title in the pic and nothing else but it's top secret for now!

04.01.2022 BIG shout out to librarians and archivists. I emailed the Library and Special Collections at St Johns College, Cambridge about some papers I would love to see, as they would be hugely useful in helping me develop a character based on a real person who is proving very elusive, and I had a reply within 2 hours! Not only that, the librarian offered to scan in some extra documents that I didn't know about actual letters and postcards written by the person I'm researching, no less! So very grateful to all the librarians who help me with book research - without them, my novels would be much the poorer!

04.01.2022 The kids all went back to school today so it was time for me to sit down and tackle this very large pile of paper! It's my third draft of TO LILLIE, FROM PARIS and I need to read through it over the next couple of weeks, do quite a lot of cutting, and turn it into a slimmer and trimmer fourth draft. I’m about 200 pages in and I’m very happy with how it’s reading but I’m not sure how much I’ve managed to cut though! I’ll try to be tougher tomorrow!

01.01.2022 Meet Pauline Gower. She's another one of the real life Air Transport Auxiliary pilots who is a character in THE PARIS SECRET. Without Pauline, it's unlikely that there would have been a women's section in the ATA as she was the one who fought politely, quietly and determinedly, who played the politics she needed to play and who realised a dream of female pilots flying all of the RAF's planes all over the country. She also fought for equal pay for her pilots and won, making th...e female pilots of the ATA the only women connected to the war effort to be receiving the same pay as their male counterparts, which was a hugely significant achievement in 1943. You can see in the photos a couple of letters written by Pauline, practically begging for more women to be allowed to join the ATA, how apologetic she is, the extremely polite tone she uses and I've always wondered whether she wrote these letters with her teeth gritted, knowing it was how she had to write them but hating it all the same. (Images come from the ATA records kept at the National Archives in Kew, which I visited in 2017.) Even though she was extremely busy running the women's section of the ATA, Pauline spent so much of her time speaking about the female pilots at lunches and functions, slowly and surely winning over the support of everyone in the country, never losing her cool in public and eventually presiding over a group of women who had the safest records of all of those employed by the ATA. I loved writing about her in THE PARIS SECRET and, even though she's a secondary character, I hope you were able to sense her determination to help the women of England, like my main character Skye Penrose, to fly. She's deservedly honoured by having her photograph on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London (first image). (In the first group image of the ATA pilots, Pauline is the one wearing trousers; in the second group image, she's the one all the women are looking at in the centre of the pic) See more