On her website, Kate Mosse describes The Map of Bones, the latest and last book in her Joubert Family Chronicles, as “a love letter to the power of women writing, to the connections between generations, and the courage of those who were explorers into new, unknown, lands.” And indeed it is, and a wonderfully engaging one at that. Read on to find out more from my interview with the author.
This is the fourth and last of your adventure series inspired by French Huguenots. What can you tell us, briefly, about the previous three books?
The Joubert Family Chronicles is a fast-paced adventure series telling the story of one family from the outbreak of the wars of religion in France in the sixteenth century that ripped the country in two to finding security and safety on the other side of the world in South Africa and London in the nineteenth century.
Love and revenge, war and displacement, hidden secrets and dangerous shadows, the series is historical adventure but written with the pace of a thriller, set against the backdrop of three hundred years of history and a feud that lasts generations. Each novel puts women’s hidden history into the spotlight and tells familiar, and not-so-familiar, history from the female point of view. The Burning Chambers begins in Carcassonne in 1562 and tells the love story of Minou and Piet across the religious divide. The City of Tears starts ten years later and follows the Jouberts to Paris, and then to safety in Amsterdam after a massacre that destroys all the great Huguenot families. They are now refugees, they have lost everything, but at the core is the heartbreak of their daughter having gone missing on the night of the Paris massacre. The Ghost Ship jumps forward a generation and tells the tale of their granddaughter, a pirate queen. Set mostly on the High Seas, it’s a queer love story.
Mystery, love, revenge, fortitude, courage, the series is a testament to the power of storytelling and how women and men struggle to survive against a backdrop of war and displacement.
Old secrets cast long shadows …
Suzanne Joubert is the main character for the first two-thirds or so of this book. What do we need to know about her, early on?
That she is very much a Joubert woman—that’s to say she is courageous and determined, proud of her ancient family and determined to restore their fortunes one way or another despite the ongoing persecution of the Huguenots; that she has suffered something terrible which forces her to flee her home in France and go in search of her legendary ancestor Louise, the pirate queen. She is independent and determined not to let her trauma define who she is. Though she’s a seventeenth-century heroine, she has a twenty-first-century determination to take control of her own life.
She travels to South Africa with her grandmother, Florence. What takes them there in August 1688?
Suzanne and her grandmother have no choice but to flee. They are Huguenots, who are being persecuted out of existence in France by the Catholic king, so they have to run in fear of their lives. To cope with her trauma, Suzanne focuses on the story of her mysterious ancestor, Louise, who sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in 1623 and was then never heard of again. She just vanished. Suzanne is determined to discover what happened to Louise and to write her back into the history books. Quickly, she realizes that the past is far from dead and buried and that her own life is in danger.
What was South Africa like back in the late seventeenth century?
This is the beginning of the colonization of the Western Cape by Dutch explorers, so there is tension between the original population and the white settlers. The Huguenots are given refuge in this nascent frontier state, but it is wild pioneer country and conditions are harsh. It is beautiful and utterly alien to anything Europeans have ever seen before, but the majestic and wild landscape offers them a place to call home. Think of the novels of Willa Cather mixed with the writing of Wilbur Smith!
It was wonderful researching these earliest days of South African society and trying to see the history beneath the buildings, the towns, the countryside we can see today. It’s also a time when the wine industry was beginning, and Huguenots played a major part in that. It’s some of the most fun research I’ve ever done!
What can you tell us about Louise, the object of Suzanne’s search?
The character of Louise is inspired by some of the most notorious female pirates in history, including the sixteenth-century Irish “she-captain” Graínne O’Malley and eighteenth-century Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who are said to have been the inspiration for Keira Knightley’s character in The Pirates of the Caribbean. We know that, throughout history, women have disguised themselves as men in order to live freer, more independent lives, and this fueled Louise’s story. She becomes the captain of her own ship and, with a crew of misfits and renegades, sails the waters around the Canary Islands in Europe disrupting slaver ships. In the end, her luck runs out and she is captured. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read The Ghost Ship!
The book doesn’t end with Suzanne. There is a later section featuring Isabelle Lepard in 1862 and 1872. Why include that third section from her point of view?
The inspiration for the whole Joubert Family Chronicles began back in 2012 when I was speaking at a literary festival in Franschhoek in South Africa. It’s a beautiful nineteenth-century Cape Dutch town of white buildings and vineyards, and that’s when I stumbled across the history of a handful of French Huguenots who had fled persecution in Europe and settled in South Africa. Against all the odds, they survived and then thrived.
I fell in love with this hidden piece of history and with Franschhoek itself. One day, standing in the Huguenot graveyard beside the museum, I had a sudden vision of a woman leaning forward to rub the lichen from a headstone to read the name written on the grave. At that moment, I knew I had to start writing to discover who that woman was and who was buried in the red African earth.… Four epic novels and hundreds of thousands of words later, I finally came face to face with her. It’s been quite the journey!
Isabelle is the storyteller; she is there to lay to rest the ghosts of the family and to uncover buried secrets. She is the chronicler of the Joubert Family. She knows that unless women’s stories are recorded and written down, they disappear from history. We disappear from history. She is there to pay tribute to all the women of the Joubert Family who have gone before her and make sure they are not forgotten. The Map of Bones, as much as anything, is a testament to the power of words and books, and it was very emotional bringing the series to an end in Isabelle’s company.
What are you working on now?
2025 is going to be another busy year! It is the twentieth anniversary of my novel Labyrinth, which readers all over the world took to their hearts and changed my life. To say thank you to readers, and to share that journey, I’ll be performing a new one-woman stage show inspired by the novel, sharing my journey with readers and giving a glimpse into the real history behind the fictional story, from Nazi Grail hunters of the twentieth century to ancient Egypt centuries before. I’ll be touring the UK in Spring 2025 and I can’t wait to be back on stage.
I am publishing my first-ever YA book. Called Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, each day tells a key story for women and girls and puts badass women and girls of the past, and present, center stage.
Readers may also know I’m also the Founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and now our sister prize, The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. The fiction prize will be celebrating its thirtieth anniversary next year, too, so that will keep me rushed off my feet with special events, interviewing some incredible women, and we’ll have a huge celebration of all our amazing writers and writing alumnae from our mentoring and writing programs in London in June 2025.
Only when that is over will I be able to get to my desk and start my new novel. I have an idea for a series of crime novels inspired by cold cases—that’s to say unsolved murders, in Sussex, where I live in England. One is set in the 1920s, about five hundred yards from where I live; another is set just after the Second World War in a neighboring town; and the first is a murder within my own family which I only learned about this year! I love crime fiction, and finally, I’m going to get the chance to write in this genre. Watch this space!
Thank you for answering my questions!
Kate Mosse is an award-winning New York Times and Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling novelist, playwright, essayist, nonfiction writer, and campaigner. Her works include the Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre, and Citadel); Gothic fiction such as The Winter Ghosts, The Mistletoe Bride, and The Taxidermist’s Daughter; and her feminist history and one-woman show Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World. She is the Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Trustee of the British Library in London, and a Visiting Professor in Creative Writing and Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester, her hometown.
Her award-winning historical adventure series The Joubert Family Chronicles—The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears, and The Ghost Ship—concludes with her latest novel, The Map of Bones.
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