Big Interview with Kate Mosse - on her latest novel The Map of Bones and celebrating the 20th anniversary of Labyrinth

The Map of Bones is the fourth and final novel in Mosse’s Joubert Family Chronicles, an epic, sweeping series spanning several generations and hundreds of years starting with the 16th century French Wars of Religion, which led to many Protestant Huguenots fleeing persecution, to the late 19th century, set across a range of locations including France, South Africa, the Netherlands and the Canary Islands. Mosse explains how the seeds for the series were sown twelve years ago.

“I was in Franschhoek in South Africa in 2012, promoting one of my books and I stumbled across a piece of history that I had known nothing about before,” she says. “Namely that in 1688 about 400 Huguenot refugees had fled on a number of ships from the sanctuary they had been given in the Netherlands to seek a new life in South Africa, a Dutch colony at the time. The reason they were there was that the governor of the Cape realized that the land there was very similar to the land in the south of France and wondered if they might be able to start planting vines and making wine.”

Don’t miss out - stay up to date with our lifestyle newsletter

Mosse was immediately intrigued and when she had the opportunity, she visited the local museum to find out more. “I also went to the graveyard and saw the name Joubert and I suddenly had this vision of a woman. I thought this could be a story about refugees, women having to leave to go to the other side of the world to start another life. Then I thought it would have to start at the beginning of the Wars of Religion in the 1500s to give the context.”

Mosse then began researching. The new novel is set in two different time frames 1688 and 1862 and features two women from the Joubert family – Suzanne and Isabelle, separated by 180 years. In the 17th century Suzanne is searching for her cousin Louise, a pirate who disappeared over sixty years previously and in the 19th century, Isabelle retraces Suzanne’s footsteps to try and fill some of the gaps in the family’s historical record. “I love research and quite often ideas for the story come out of things I discover,” says Mosse. “Like any novelist who writes novels inspired by history, I have to have the facts. I do all my research myself so I know the world that I am writing about and I research each of the books up front before I start writing. With The Map of Bones, I knew it was going to be a quest novel – two women of the Joubert family on a journey to discover the story of another woman in the family but I didn’t know anything more than that.”

As the whole series is the story of a Huguenot family forced to flee conflict and persecution in order to find a place of safety, there are obvious modern-day resonances. “In order for historical fiction to work, it has to be completely set in and focused on the time period you are writing about,” she says. “However, readers, and me as a human being in the world, can’t help but hear echoes of the past in the present. That’s why I think my sort of writing is so popular because it encourages people to consider some of the difficult issues of our time.”

In her introduction to The Map of Bones Mosse writes that at the book’s heart is “a belief in the power of words, that unless women’s stories and testimonies are included alongside those of men in the historical records, it cannot really be called history at all.” A lot of her work has been about raising awareness of this and she is the founder of the global campaign #Women in History.

“First and foremost, I want to entertain and excite people so that when they finish a book, they will think it was time well spent, that is my purpose as a novelist,” she says. “Having said that, women and men built the world together and often the writing of history gives the impression that women weren’t there at all. Part of my approach in my fiction is to put women back where they belong, alongside many fabulous male characters. It is about using a 360-degree lens – telling the stories of all of us, women and men.”

The young adult non-fiction book Mosse is currently working on, Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, will be published in autumn 2025 and celebrates women and girls of the past and present who are changing the world for the better. It came out of a previous book of hers, published in 2022, that explored the significant, and often unacknowledged, part played by women in history. “When I was touring with Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries – How Women (Also) Built the World, after every event I would have teachers coming up to me and saying ‘we wish we had a book like this for girls,’” says Mosse. “So, this is it; I am really thrilled to have been asked to do it and I am very much enjoying writing it.”

She is looking forward to getting out on the road in the spring with her solo stage show Labyrinth, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of her novel of the same name, the first in her Carcassonne-set multimillion-selling Languedoc Trilogy. “Labyrinth was the novel that changed my life and made it possible for me to become a full-time writer,” she says. “The reaction to the book over the years has been really humbling. I love getting out to meet readers and I really enjoy performance. I will start writing the show in the new year – there will be images, music and soundscapes, so it will be a proper piece of theatre. It will be a lovely moment of taking stock of Labyrinth and of my life as a writer.”

The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse, published by by Mantle (Pan Macmillan) is out now. Mosse appears at Selby Town Hall, October 31, The Wesley Centre, Malton, November 1, The Old Wollen, Farsley, November 2 and West Lane Baptist Church, Haworth, November 3. Her live one-woman stage show Labyrinth, will be on tour in spring 2025. Details labyrinthlive2025.com