Kate Mosse on the End of an Era and Writing The Map of Bones

The End of an Era

When The Map of Bones publishes this month, it will mark the end of twelve years of dreaming, planning, writing and editing a series of four novels. The Joubert Family Chronicles covers 300 years of history set against the backdrop of the French wars of religion and the Huguenot diaspora, and travels the world. The first - The Burning Chambers - is set in Carcassonne, Toulouse and Puivert in the 16th century; The City of Tears in Paris and Amsterdam takes the story of the Joubert family on through as the world around them collapses; The Ghost Ship is a pirate novel set in the early 17th century in La Rochelle and the Canary Islands; the last instalment, The Map of Bones, is set in southern Africa in 1688 and 1862, and characters from my feminist history Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries make an appearance in this final novel.

It has been a very intense period of writing for me and it was emotional finishing The Map of Bones. Only once before (with Citadel) have I sat at my computer with tears in my eyes. It feels like the end of an era, not least because the first glimmerings of the idea for the books came from first visiting Franschhoek in the winelands of the western Cape back in 2012.

I was in town for the book festival and knew nothing about the history of this beautiful part of the Cape. But then as I stood in the Huguenot graveyard beside the Memorial Museum, learning how a handful of refugees had arrived in the Cape in 1688, impoverished, victimised, exiled from the land they loved, and yet found the courage to build new lives on the far side of the world (and helped found the South African wine industry in the process), I felt the first glimmerings of an idea. In one of the most moments all writers of fiction hope for, I suddenly imagined a young woman in this very spot in the shadow of the Franschhoek mountains – the name Franschhoek means the ‘French corner’ – bending to rub the lichen from a headstone.  And then it happened, ‘the whispering in the landscape’, that sense that here, in the winelands of the Cape, was a story I could tell: a story beginning with the outbreak of the vicious religious civil wars that would rip France to pieces, about a feud between two families, one Protestant/Huguenot and one Catholic, about a quest that would take the characters from my beloved Carcassonne in 1562 to this spot in South Africa in 1862.

Years of researching, visiting the countries at the heart of the story, archives and libraries, museum and art galleries followed – Carcassonne and Toulouse, a writer’s residency in Amsterdam, weekends spent in the once-great Huguenot capital of La Rochelle, sailing around the Canary Islands, and of course South Africa – Cape Town, Stellenbosch, the Drakenstein Valley and Franschhoek itself. Gradually, I constructed the real-life world against which my imaginary characters would live their lives.

So, finally, it ends here with The Map of Bones: what an epic journey.  After many years, and several hundred thousand words, I made it back to that graveyard in Franschhoek. Now I know who that lone woman in the graveyard is and who lies in the red earth beneath her feet.  This is how fiction works, the glimmer of idea, a character not yet formed, the world opening out before the writer, everything leading to the resolution of the story.

The Map of Bones (which, like The Ghost Ship, can be read as a stand-alone) is a love letter to the incredible landscape and history of southern Africa. It is an historical adventure novel, but more than anything it is a story about the power of words, about the belief that that unless women’s stories and testimonies are included alongside men in the historical records, it cannot really be called history at all. Both heroines – Suzanne Joubert in the 17th century and Isabelle Lepard Joubert in the 19th – know that, for a woman to survive in a world that is harsh and hostile to them, they need not only courage but the right to tell their own stories.  Born centuries apart, they understand how easy it is for women’s experiences to be forgotten, overlooked and forever lost.

The Map of Bones was a joy to write, though tinged with sadness. These characters have kept me company for half of my writing life and I am sorry to say goodbye.  At the same time, with my Labyrinth Live one-woman theatre show to write for spring 2025 and my first ever YA book – A Feminist History for Every Day of the Year – to finish, there are plenty of other voices clamouring to be heard.

After that, who knows …