In Kim Sakwa’s debut novel, The Prophecy, modern-day medical practitioner Gwendolyn Reynolds is swept out of her routine life by a storm and into 15th-century Scotland. There, she lands in the arms of a Highland laird bound by an old prophecy to love a woman from another time. Kirkus Reviews describes the novel as “both escapist and heartfelt, inviting readers to surrender to the pull of destiny.”

Like her time-traveling characters, Sakwa has no trouble moving between worlds. “I have these vivid pictures in my mind, and I love transferring them to paper,” she says. “It’s not the easiest thing to do. It takes discipline and work, but living in that world… There’s no place I’d rather be, besides with my children.”

As a child, the author lived in Florida, Georgia, and her home state of Michigan amid her parents’ divorce, though she ultimately found her way back to Michigan. Throughout her life, she’s always carried a passion for storytelling, drawn to the nighttime soap operas of the Aaron Spelling era but also fascinated by the behind-the-scenes aesthetics of the writers themselves. “You would see these writers sitting at a desk, and they looked so happy,” she explains. “Something just clicked with me: That’s what I wanted to do.”

But before she became a full-time novelist, Sakwa ran a professional organizing business that helped clients bring order to cluttered spaces, a career path that isn’t hard to picture: Behind Sakwa during our call, her bookshelves are lined up with obvious precision. When asked whether the two crafts are connected, she says, “I’m just immersive by nature… I give my all to everything. Not everything sticks, but if I’m going to try something, I’m fully going to try.”

Yet for someone whose books track intertwined characters across multiple volumes, she admits, “I am not a planner,” when it comes to her writing. “I [generally] know the story before I sit down to actually write it. Not that it doesn’t change… These characters can take me in different directions.” Both careers, in her telling, come from the same instinct: “My soul’s mission is just… I just want to make people happy,” she says. “And that makes me happy, too.”

Sakwa wrote The Prophecy in 2004, though it would be 15 years before the book reached print. When she started writing it, she had a mission statement in mind, and it’s the same one she keeps circling back to, unprompted, throughout our conversation: The Prophecy offers readers the same escape that books have always given her. “I took everything I loved most about historical romance, historical literature, and time travel,” she says. “If I’m looking for an escape, what about ‘supplanting’ somebody somewhere else?”

But placing these characters into the world of Scotland didn’t come from personal reasons so much as happenstance. “I don’t think it had to be set in 15th-century Scotland,” she says. But “when I first wrote the book, that’s where it ended” up. That setting stuck; Sakwa set her characters’ stories against a gorgeous rendering of Scotland:

As he continued to swim upon his back, willing the hand that held her atop his chest to feel even the faintest of a heartbeat, he realized the storm was gone. No prevailing mist. Not a cloud in the clearest of night skies. Only a full moon and bright stars accompanied the cool, crisp air.

His men waited just beyond the shoreline and formed a tight circle as he straddled her body. He heard their swords drawn in unison, their pledges made to this woman, their oaths sworn as he ripped her shirt in two and tossed aside her satchel that had come loose as well.

The Prophecy is the first of four published books in the Highland Lairds of the Crest series. Sakwa has also launched a companion contemporary series, the Brothers Montgomery, which follows descendants of the debut novel’s characters, “supplanted” into the present day. When asked what draws her to these family sagas, Sakwa says she can’t get enough of them as both a reader and a writer. “There’s nothing better than a family unit being the focus—the loyalty, the camaraderie,” she says. “Creating these great heroes and heroines who are all about unconditional love and being there for each other… I love it.”

Music plays just as big a role in Sakwa’s process. For every book, she builds a dedicated soundtrack that further adds dimension to its characters. “It’s almost like Method acting,” she says. “I feel so much of everything that’s going on, and the music is a part of that.”

It would take more than a decade for her words to reach print. Consultant Jane Friedman pushed her to submit the manuscript to various New York publishers, where an editor from a major house told her something that has always stuck: Plenty of people can finish a book, but not everyone can tell a story; she could. It took two more years, but The Prophecy was finally published in 2019.

Sakwa asked Kirkus to review it in the middle of the busiest stretch of her career. She was racing to finish The Promise, Book Four of the Highland Lairds of the Crest series, while new foreign-language translations were arriving; her dog also grew increasingly ill before passing away in 2024. “There were times I was working, like, 20 hours a day,” she says. Staying busy, she explains, was the only way she got through the wait. When the Kirkus review finally came back, she was still bracing for criticism. “I kept waiting for the one jab,” she admits.

But that sentence never came.

The positive feedback that followed still means something to her. Sakwa is no stranger to the bestsellers lists: She earned an Editor’s Pick from the Publishers Weekly–owned BookLife Reviews, and Kirkus recommends The Prophecy, saying its “lush setting and memorable characters” lift “this novel a notch above most tales of romance.” She says that’s the kind of professional affirmation that matters, even to a writer who’s learned to believe in herself. “That’s great,” she explains, “but when you have professional validation, it helps, too.”

Her readership now stretches well beyond her home in Michigan or even the United States: Her books have been translated into French, German, and Italian, and she corresponds personally with her overseas fan base. “I get a lot of emails,” she says. “I love, love [chatting] with my readers.” Her rule is simple: “If you email me, I’m going to answer you.”

The road to this moment in her career didn’t occur overnight, and Sakwa is vocal about sharing the lessons she’s learned along the way. “Timing is everything,” she says of the wait. That same self-trust has carried into how she talks about her career. “I think I trust myself now to know this is right. I’m on the right path. I’m doing the right thing.”

These days, writing still runs through everything else. She splits her time between visiting with her two adult children, taking long walks with her mother’s dog, and focusing on the next story. “My whole life really is about writing and nurturing that art,” she says.

Costa Beavin Pappas lives in New York and Cairo and is an arts and culture writer with bylines in the Los Angeles Times, BOMB magazine, Newsweek, and ELLE.