The Burning Chambers (The Joubert Family Chronicles)

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Mosse’s fans will relish this tale of secrets, love and treachery - The Times on The Burning Chambers Welcome to #WomanInHistory, the global campaign to honour and celebrate the incredible women of the past in whose footsteps we walk. The campaign began during the publication week for my latest novel, The City of Tears, at a FANE event on 20 January 2021. In an event with Jojo Moyes - with special guests Bernardine Evaristo, Ken Follett, Lee Child, Bettany Hughes, Paula Hawkins, Anita Anand, Sara Collins, Professor Kate Williams, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Madeline Miller and Damian Barr - we invited everyone to nominate a woman from history they wanted to champion or thought should be better known. I’m delighted to say there will now be a book – publishing in October 2022 – and a television documentary series inspired by the campaign. She is particularly interested in those moments when societies and countries have stood at crossroads. “All of my books are set at a turning point in history,” she explains, on cusps at which “if things had gone the other way, the whole of what happened would have been different. So in City of Tears, obviously, it’s the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It looked like there would be peace. And because of that, there wasn’t, and it went on for another generation. In The Burning Chambers, the first one, it’s if the Duke of Guise had not opened fire on people praying in Vassy on the first of March 1562, the wars of religion would not have happened like that.”

Kate hosts the pre performance interview series at Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex, chairs Platform Events for the National Theatre in London, as well as interviewing writers, directors, campaigners and actors at literary and theatre festivals in the UK and beyond. Kate was awarded a Fellowship at the Writer's House in Amsterdam in 2019. She is a visiting Professor of Creative Writing & Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester, a Patron of the Chichester Festival of Dance, Music and Speech and President of the Festival of Chichester. A sweeping and epic love story, ranging from France in 1610 to Amsterdam and the Canary Islands in the 1620s, The Ghost Ship is a thrilling novel of adventure and buccaneering, love and revenge, stolen fortunes and hidden secrets on the High Seas. Most of all, it is a tale of defiant women in a man's world.

Languedoc Trilogy in Order

But her years of caring for family members have also paid another, perhaps unexpected, dividend. “I’m aware that some of the scenes I write in my fiction have been absolutely given more depth because of the emotions that I have experienced in real life. None of my characters are me, none of the characters are doing things that I want to do or wish to do. But the emotions that go into a novel, they come from somewhere, don’t they?” Mosse shows a deft command of character and narrative in this second volume of a planned sequence - Sunday Times Impressively bold and ambitious, it features betrayals, broken friendship, family secrets and the horrors of fanaticism. Fans will love it - Daily Mail

Another meticulously researched and stunningly written novel by a much-loved and highly accomplished author. I adored it!' - Santa Montefiore Wonderful, rip roaringly adventurous and full of indelible characters. Mosse is a conjurer - Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch I wasn’t sure I was going to do something like that,” she says of the book, “but I was asked to and then I realised that it was about the invisibility of carers, and therefore there was a sense of a responsibility. If you have any sort of platform and you are a carer you should be saying, I’m one too, because we are everywhere hidden in plain sight.” Fifty Shades of Feminism (essay – edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes & Susie Orbach, Virago, 2013) Mosse includes all the ingredients you would expect from a historical epic – murder, treachery, lost children, stolen relics, buried secrets. - Stephanie Merritt, Observer

People don’t want to read a book about the refugee crisis, but they can fall in love with characters and feel their hearts broken when they have to flee their homes and have nowhere to live Gripping, thrilling, a spectacular work of scholarly reimagining, The Ghost Ship is a beautiful book about two women, about love, courage, suffering, and a world in which everything was on a knife edge. A stunning novel, a whole world recreated - Kate Williams, historian and author of Rival Queens A gorgeously written, utterly absorbing epic and, despite being set in the sixteenth century, has some very pertinent messages for our time about the evils of religious persecution and the transcendent power of love and family. In case it’s not clear enough yet, I absolutely LOVED it - Lucy Foley, author of The Hunting Party Another of Mosse’s immersive dramas, which takes you to the heart of the past - Grazia on The Burning Chambers A gorgeously written, utterly absorbing epic and, despite being set in the sixteenth century, has some very pertinent messages for our time about the evils of religious persecution and the transcendent power of love and family. In case it’s not clear enough yet, I absolutely LOVED it - Lucy Foley, bestselling author of The Hunting Party and The Paris Apartment, on The City of Tears

That rare thing, a novel with vast scope and ambition, brilliantly achieved, but also deeply personal, finely detailed and nuanced. I was utterly immersed in this spell-binding story - Rosamund Lupton, author of Three Hours Rich with historical detail, as you’d expect from Mosse, but it’s Minou, the fiery heroine, who makes this a must-read - Good Housekeeping Book of the Month The Ghost Ship—which follows The Burning Chambers and The City of Tears—is described by the publisher as “an epic tale of courageous women battling to survive in a man’s world, of vengeance and breathtaking peril on the high seas, of long-buried family secrets and a love story spanning three generations”. Mosse has, for many years, been a full-throated advocate for the power of books and reading to provide fulfilment, entertainment and education. Perhaps her greatest achievement beyond her own fiction is her creation, in 1996, of what is now the Women’s Prize for Fiction; its winners have included the very first, the late Helen Dunmore, Carol Shields, Zadie Smith, Eimear McBride and the recently victorious – and two-time winner – Barbara Kingsolver. Now, with Mosse as founder director, it has just launched its inaugural nonfiction prize, as a response to research showing that women who write nonfiction are less likely to be reviewed, to be shortlisted or win prizes, than their male counterparts. The work of ensuring that women writers’ work is judged on a level playing field continues.Similarly, with the caveat that she is not a historian, she believes that had Henry IV of France not been assassinated in 1610, there is a case to be made that the French Revolution might not have followed or, at least, not in the way it did. “Because what happened at that moment was that his toleration, his attempt to build a modern society, which is what he was doing, his understanding that Huguenots – you wouldn’t use this phrase, but it’s essentially what they were – were the working middle class. And the wealth was there – that wasn’t to do with aristocracy, or what would have been seen as the peasantry at the other end. He was building a modern state that could have stood against anyone. Toulouse: As the religious divide deepens in the Midi, and old friends become enemies, Minou and Piet both find themselves trapped in Toulouse, facing new dangers as sectarian tensions ignite across the city, the battle lines are drawn in blood and the conspiracy darkens further. Meanwhile, as a long-hidden document threatens to resurface, the mistress of Puivert is obsessed with uncovering its secret and strengthening her power.... Carcassonne, 1562: 19-year-old Minou Joubert receives an anonymous letter at her father’s bookshop. Sealed with a distinctive family crest, it contains just five words: "She Knows That You Live". But before Minou can decipher the mysterious message, a chance encounter with a young Huguenot convert, Piet Reydon, changes her destiny forever. For Piet has a dangerous mission of his own, and he will need Minou’s help if he is to get out of La Cité alive.