Chichester writer Kate Mosse completes epic cycle of historical novels
An epic tale spanning continents and centuries comes to a conclusion with the publication of The Map of Bones.
Chichester-based Kate Mosse’s new book, published on October 10, is the fourth – and final – novel in The Joubert Family Chronicles, following the bestselling The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears and The Ghost Ship.
“It does feel like the end of an era,” Kate said. “It does feel really emotional to have reached this point. I'm just about to go on a big book tour to lots of places and festivals, and for me a book is only really finished once I'm sharing it with readers. That's a really big part of writing a book for me. But I will be exhausted by December when I get back and maybe then I will feel a bit hollow and a little bit bereft. But for the moment I'm really excited to be sharing this story with readers.
“The idea for the series came to me 12 years ago. The first moment was at a book festival in
Franschhoek, 30 kilometres east of Cape Town and I stumbled upon a piece of history that I knew nothing about at all, and that was that a handful of Huguenot refugees had gone to the Cape in 1688 fleeing their persecutors, leaving their homeland via whatever way they could to escape. They found themselves on the other side of the world, and I found that a large part of the South African wine industry was actually on the shoulders of these refugees. I went to the museum and walked to the graveyard and I saw all the names from France. Suddenly I had an image of a woman in the 19th century, a woman leaning forward and rubbing the lichen on the grave to see who was buried there. And I just knew that there was a story that I wanted to tell – a story about the Huguenots and the French wars of religion.”
It was to be a series which began in Carcassonne in 1562 spanning 300 years to finish in South Africa: “I always knew it was going to be this scale. I knew I was going to write a Romeo & Juliet story, a love affair between a Catholic girl and a Protestant boy and the feud with their entire families and that it was going to follow their stories and the stories of their descendants across 300 years to come back to Franschhoek.
“And it feels huge to be finishing now and to finally know who that woman in the graveyard was. I know now who she was and I know now who she had come to find…”
In Olifantshoek, Southern Africa, in 1688, Suzanne Joubert, a Huguenot refugee from war-torn France, arrives in search of her cousin — the notorious she-captain and pirate commander Louise Reydon-Joubert — who landed at the Cape of Good Hope more than sixty years before then disappeared without a trace…
In Franschhoek, Southern Africa, in 1862. Nearly one hundred and eighty years after Suzanne’s perilous journey, another intrepid and courageous woman of the Joubert family — Isabelle Lepard — has journeyed to the small frontier town once known as Oliftantshoek in search of her long-lost relations. Intent on putting the women of her family back into the history books, she quickly discovers that the crimes and tragedies still shadow the present. And now, Isabelle faces a race against time if she is to discover the truth and escape with her life…