Paperback concludes epic tale for Chichester's Kate Mosse

For Chichester-based novelist Kate Mosse, it 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, the culmination of an idea which first came to her 12 years ago.

“Your relationship with a book does change depending on perspective and when you meet people and talk to people,” Kate says. “I did a big book tour for the hardback but for the paperback it's more about making sure it's in the summer reading displays all ready for people when they are going on holiday and want a really good meaty read.

“But what I've loved over the last eight or nine months was the fact that a lot of people had read this book without having read the other ones, and then they have gone back to the beginning and started reading them.

“Absolutely you can read it as a standalone if you are standing at the airport terminal or at the ferry. It is a detective story which absolutely works by itself.”

But Kate loves the thought of people now discovering the series retrospectively, just as so many others have waited patiently for the publication of each new book in turn. And she has also enjoyed the response to the fact that a few non-fiction names from her book Warrior Queens also found their way into the book towards the end.

Inevitably bringing book to a conclusion does come with a degree of mixed feelings: “At the end of every book there is a moment where you take a breather and you think what next and then comes the adrenaline of going on to the next book. I think readers maybe feel more sadness at the end of a book than writers do because that's the nature of writing. You move on to the next thing and there's no real time to sit and grieve. You're thinking about the next book and how you can make it work out.”

As indeed Kate certainly is: “I have got the next four or five books in my mind. I'm not writing another series next but will the book be epic? Definitely yes. I've also got a couple of crime novels and a ghost story. It is all about the timing and in what order you write them.”

As for the series now concluding, Kate explains: “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…”