Chichester novelist Kate Mosse celebrates 20 years of Labyrinth

The success of Labyrinth, a global number-one bestseller, enabled Kate to write full time. To mark two decades since its release, she will be on the road offering the one-woman show Labyrinth Live: Unlocking the Secrets of the Labyrinth. With music, imagery and film, Kate will reveal the history and the mysteries that inspired the book, taking audiences on an epic journey across the breathtaking landscape of the Languedoc – of Carcassonne, Toulouse, Chartres and the Pyrenees. It will be so immersive, she promises, the moment you enter, you will feel like you are in France.

Dates include Saturday, March 8 at Winchester’s Theatre Royal; Wednesday, March 12 at Worthing Pavilion; and Sunday, March 23 at Portsmouth’s New Theatre Royal. Tickets on sale via www.labyrinthlive2025.com.

“It feels like a lifetime ago that Labyrinth was published,” Kate says, “but also as if that time has gone by in the blink of an eye. Labyrinth was a novel that changed my life. It was also a novel that so many people took to their hearts. I was very, very lucky. It was one of those novels that was at the right place at the right time. It was published around the world and I had amazing experiences going around the world talking about the book.

“And it was the novel that made it possible for me to give up the day job and become a full-time writer. Nobody starts writing fiction thinking that they're going to make a living out of it but I was very lucky. It just happened to be a book that caught the public's imagination, and that’s one of the reasons why I'm celebrating the book now – in fact not just celebrating the book but saying thank you to the readers that have enjoyed it.”

Quite why it enjoyed the success it did, Kate admits that as the author she's probably the last person to say: “But I think there was just something in the zeitgeist at that particular time. The Da Vinci Code had come out the year before, and I think that released many people's hunger for the sort of book that had a mix of arcane superstition and legend-type stories mixed in with, in his case, the modern day and, in my case, partly the modern day and partly historical. I think there are many people that had not read a novel for a long time but read Dan Brown's book and then read mine – though of course they are very different in many ways.

“And then there was also an increasing interest in this particular part of France called Languedoc which was becoming very much a tourist destination. We had bought a house in Carcassonne in 1989 at a time when there were no flights but at that period of time it all started to change and it was becoming a destination.”

Another lucky break was appearing on Richard and Judy's television show which helped make the book the biggest-selling book of 2006: “In those days Richard and Judy on television were one of the most powerful ways to sell books, and it was the first book in a new season that started in January. It was very nerve-racking because you just didn't know what they were going to say about the book.

“But it was really interesting because it was Richard, as opposed to Judy, who led the discussion. From every piece of research into reading patterns that has ever been done women tend to read books by men and women and men mostly read books by men. But they had guests on and they were all very, very complimentary and the next day alone the paperback sold 57,000 copies such was the power of Richard and Judy on TV. I was very, very deeply relieved that it gone down well and it went straight to number one and was top of the charts for the next six months.”

But the relief was more personal than that: “My wonderful mum and dad were very, very proud and my mum had told everybody that I was going to be on TV. There was even a sign in the butcher’s shop saying that Barbara and Richard’s daughter was going to be on TV tomorrow and all I could think of was if they didn't like the book on Richard and Judy, then my mum would be mortified. Fortunately they loved it.

“So really the whole thing was these things aligning. It just became a book that people heard about, and the whole thing was a wonderful, wonderful experience.”

And this despite being published on what turned out to be a very, very grim day in our nation’s history. It came out on July 7 2005 which happened to be Kate’s husband Greg's birthday but it was also the day of the appalling London bombings. As Kate says these were the days before smart phones. She knew nothing about what had happened as she headed to London to her publishers for publication day.

“I got off the train at Victoria and I noticed that it was very crowded and I walked to my publishers office and when I got there they looked at me like ‘What are you doing here?’ I said ‘It is my publication day’ and they said ‘Haven't you heard what has happened?’

“And obviously a book does not matter at all compared to the terrible thing that had just happened but everything planned for the campaign for the book, none of it happened – none of it happened for this book that I'd been writing for ten years. But the fortunate thing was that booksellers were talking to their customers about it and the word started to spread…”

Translated into 38 languages, Labyrinth quickly became an award-winning international phenomenon. Tom Felton, Jessica Brown Findlay, Vanessa Kirby, Sebastian Stan and John Hurt led the all-star cast of the Scott Free TV adaptation.

To mark its anniversary, Phoenix published a lavish new hardcover special edition in February, with a specially commissioned introduction by Sir Ian Rankin and a new afterword by Kate.

Labyrinth: July 1209: in Carcassonne a 17-year-old girl is given a mysterious book by her father which he claims contains the secret of the true Grail. Although Alais cannot understand the strange words and symbols hidden within, she knows that her destiny lies in keeping the secret of the labyrinth safe. July 2005: Alice Tanner discovers two skeletons in a forgotten cave in the French Pyrenees. Puzzled by the labyrinth symbol carved into the rock, she realises she's disturbed something that was meant to remain hidden. Somehow, a link to a horrific past – her past – has been revealed.