Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse with Kate Mosse

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

This week's book guest is The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse.Sara and Cariad are joined by the international bestselling author, Founder Director of the Women's Prize for Fiction and CBE Kate Mosse herself.In this episode they discuss motherhood, the Women's Prize, whispering in the landscape, and overnight success.Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Trigger warning: In this episode we discuss sexual assault and rape.The Map of Bones is available to buy here.Tickets for Kate's live show Labyrinth Live: 20th Anniversary Theatre Tour are available to buy here.You can find Kate on Instagram @katemossewriterCariad’s children's book The Christmas Wish-tastrophe is available to buy now.Sara’s debut novel Weirdo is published by Faber & Faber and is available to buy here.Cariad’s book You Are Not Alone is published by Bloomsbury and is available to buy here.Tickets for Sara's tour show I Am A Strange Gloop are available to buy from sarapascoe.co.ukFollow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Pasco. Hello, I'm Carriad Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we've created the Weirdo's Book Club.

Join us. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. A place for the person who'd love to be in a real book club, but doesn't like wine or nibbles. Or being around other people. Is that you? Join us. Check out our Instagram at Sarah and Carriad's Weirdo's Book Club for the upcoming books we're going to be discussing. You can read along and share your opinions.

Or just skulk around in your raincoat like the weirdo you are. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. This week's book guest is The Map of Bones by Kate Moss. What's it about? It's the story of Suzanne Jobert and her epic adventure from escaping religious persecution in France, heading to Amsterdam,

and then getting on a ship and starting a new life and many adventures on the Cape in 1688. What qualifies it for the weirdos book club? Well, Suzanne is a 17th century woman descended from pirates who carries a gun. Our kind of gal. In this episode we discuss Motherhood, the Women's Prize,

whispering in the landscape, and overnight success. Kate Moss is a CBE, an award-winning novelist. She's written 10 novels and short story collections. Her books have sold over 5 million copies. They've been translated into 38 languages and she was also the founder-director

of the Women's Prize for Fiction and the New Prize, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction. Trigger warning. In this episode, we discuss sexual assault and rape. Welcome to the show. Kate Moss. Firstly, I wanted to start by saying congratulations on your CBE. I had Princess Anne giving me mine.

And I really admire her. I think she's great. And so I went up and we had to chat and I said, you should write a book. She said, oh, I couldn't get it. I wouldn't be allowed to write a book. And we just had a nice chat. And my daughter and my son-in-law and my son were standing there. And they're like, and the master-adarmes, what are it saying, what are they talking about?

She's not their ages. Oh, you're having a chin-work. Oh, yeah. Having a chin-wine. You're talking about my shoes. You know my big shoes. my triple-stack broth of creepers. Oh, nice.

That's very good. She came to my school once, Princess. Oh, did she? They chose people to talk, and this boy was supposed to answer her question. He just didn't say anything, so I answered because I was next to him. But he seemed relieved. He wasn't bothered. Yeah.

I think that's a good thing to do. I think so. You're so embarrassing. Except him, yeah. I did, but it's backfired other times in my life. Let me tell you. She looked like, come on. And he was a staring at her.

It was that lovely thing that Maggie Smith once was asked. Did you ever see this? She was asked a boy was looking at her in a very strange away in a supermarket and in the end he came out with it and said can you really turn into a cat and Maggie Smith said pull yourself together oh dear

get your shit together kid fuck sake time to grow up okay this isn't Hogwarts it's ASDA Kate you have had such an incredible career it's not over Karen I'm sorry this is your life

but like you know we read we read a lot myself and Sarah and like you see the books, like it's not often you get a full page with an offer of their other work. Yeah. It's absolutely staggering. And hugely successful books. Yes. And also all as big as this one. Prolific. Yeah. You're showing off actually. Yeah. Well, can I just say I am older than I look? Except in these lights, I'm actually younger than I look. I guess what I'm saying is you also, you came to writing later. Did you? Yeah. She worked in publishing. Oh. This was going to be one of my questions. So I don't know about when you're at the beginning of your writing career. Well, I, I mean,

It was a dare, really. Oh, tell us. Come on him. A kind of a dare. So I... So you were an editor. You're working on... I was an editor and I worked in publishing and I was getting involved with setting up a literary prize called the Women's Prize for Fiction, which we will talk about.

So that came first? Yes, all of this. And then I was sitting with a friend who's a literary agent and I was expecting my second child, who is now 32. And I said, you know, it's amazing. The book I really would have valued that I needed to read. when I was pregnant. I found pregnancy really hard. I wasn't good at it.

And I said, you know, it's amazing. When I was pregnant first time, the book wasn't there, and now I'm pregnant again and still isn't there. And he said, well, why don't you stop moaning and write it? And I kind of tossed my hair

and went, I will. That's exactly what Maggie Smith would have said. Yes, exactly. There we go. And so the way I tell the story is better. I say the next day he rang up with an offer from a publisher, but he said it wasn't quite that quickly.

But in your, in the brain, the narrative's all so true. Yeah, it's better if it's the next story. stay, isn't it, really? We'll take your version. Yeah, my version. You know, I make stuff up for a living now. I mean, it's got to be true.

And so then I did write a book about the experience of being pregnancy. I interviewed a pregnant, interviewed lots of other women. And, you know, just worked out some of the emotional stuff that I was thinking about being pregnant. Because I didn't like it, you know, it just didn't suit me. And it's very lonely if you have that experience because I think even people who've had similar experiences are scared of projecting that or saying anything negative to a pregnant person. Yeah. So they do the opposite, which is. Isn't this great and isn't this lovely and aren't we all lucky?

Which is nice because you don't want to bring other people down. But I was one of those that looked pregnant 20 minutes after conception. Was spotty, felt sick the entire time. Yeah. And was absolutely terrified all the time. I always thought something was going to go wrong. So I never had a lovely moment of blossoming or blooming. So that's how I got into writing.

And then out of that I wrote something and so on. And that book was called Becoming a Mother. Yes. And when did you write that then? When did you write that then? 92. Wow. And so, because obviously, having it had also not fun pregnancies, now there is much more discussion about these things. But at that time, was there just not a discussion of the other

side of pregnancy? Is that what you felt the book was missing? No, yes, but I think it was also that it can be nuanced, can be, I really, really was thrilled to be pregnant, really wanted to be a mother. But I also felt, I hated my body being taken over. As a feminist, I found that whole, your body becomes other people's, that people are touching you all the time. That doesn't happen so much now. My daughter is 34 and has a two-year-old. And listening to her experience is, there's much more respect in that. People don't walk up to you and just touch your... Some do. Some do. But I mean, it was just, it was assumed that that was okay. And actually, I'm not in any way a sensitive flower and mind those things in normal circumstances,

but because I felt so terrible about myself and I felt very undermined I'm confident and know who I I mean all of those things and I didn't feel like myself emotionally that was the thing really so it was it was a good thing to do because you can't if you feel awful apart

from anything else when you're pregnant it's really hard to do anything else I mean I was working of course and I were doing all of those kind of things so that was how I started writing so when you were writing that did you think oh I've become a writing to now? Or did you think you were just writing that book?

I thought I would, I think, I would say I wrote four books as a reader who wrote. Right. Okay. And I think that it was with my 2005 book, Labyrinth. Yeah, which was huge. Which was huge. Translated into 37 languages. I know. Like extraordinary. I know. It was, and the thing about it was that the joy in a way was that it was utterly unexpected. So I've been writing it for a long time. there was a moment at which I delivered the first draft and we were going on a family holiday

and it's a grail story essentially but it's a grail story with women at the heart of it and women's stories at the heart of it and I delivered the first draft to my agent and we were in the bookshop and the deal is always if we're going on holiday that my children get to choose a book for the play and one of them, neither of them claim to having done this

and I don't think it can have been a random job It must be one of my children. Pulled down a book and said, oh, mum, you should read this. This sounds just up your street. Grail novel set in France, Da Vinci Code. And of course, that felt like the worst thing in the world. It's like, oh, my God, someone's written it.

And then, of course, I read it, and it's a great read. Nothing to do with my book. But at the same time, we all know how publishing works. And it's like, oh, well, we've done that now. So that felt quite bad. It's either we've filled that gap, or let's do very. very similar things with quite a similar cover

because people who like that might buy another one and that's not great. That is really what happened to me though. Two things happened in a way with that. Firstly, the DaVinci Code people can be very snobby about but they shouldn't be because what that book did was

he got people reading who had not read a novel for years and years particularly men. Yeah, and then also talking about it because what happens when you're on a tube or a bus and everyone's reading a book? It's happening at the moment now with Richard Osmond and stuff. People go, well, I want to be part of a conversation. I want to give my opinion on that book, even if it's a negative opinion.

You don't get it quite so much as you used to because so many people read on phones. But that moment, honestly, if you're on a plane or you're on a train and you see people's reading it. It's really, really exciting. That must happen to you a lot. Well, it did in the early days and I do, but I learnt my lesson because I once, I don't know why I was feeling so cocky, but I went over to say to somebody, you know, would you like me to sign it? That's my book. She said, no, it isn't. I bought it in Smith.

I was an amazing thing because it meant there was an appetite for a certain sort of historical adventure, which is what I write. And I had a brilliant review early on, I think it was in The Guardian, that said, this is Dan, Labyrinth is Dan Brown for girls with A-levels. Which is just the best place, isn't it? I'm happy, I'll take that. And you clearly work those girls with A-levels. So it was very, very lucky. But it was also that it was going to the place, Kakasan, in the southwest of France, the experience the first time of a novel coming to me, which is what I now call the whispering and the landscape. The standing there in Kakasan and hearing kind of, oh, there's a story for me here.

You know, there are characters who, if I can shut my eyes and listen hard enough, I will hear them. And I will start writing. And so what I feel is that it was going to Kakassan and listening to my instincts made me a writer. Whereas before I had written books, but I was almost kind of always from the outside writing in, rather than from the inside writing out, which is what happens. Well, it's also a really good example of like writing can be work, you know, like a craft, and you can study it and you can try really hard and you can put your hours in and you can edit it. Or there is a magic and inspiration, a muse involved in it as well.

Yes. And also, you know, I became an overnight success. at the age of 43. Yeah, that's my age. I might become successful. Give it time. Give it time. As I said it, I'm actually doing fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I might wake up tomorrow as Beyonce as well. Also, it's not about me. Carry on. No, no, no, no, do go. It's that thing that it sounds wonderful if you are a young person and it's your first book

and you suddenly get all of that thing. But if you're my age when it happens to you, firstly you know it's luck. And that is not in any way being self-deprecating about my book. Right place, right time. Right place, right time that is nothing to do with you. But also, you know, and because I'd been a publisher, I knew this,

that there are many amazing books that just don't get their moment in the sun. There's also a lot of really terrible books. And you go, how? How is that the book that everyone wants to read? The good thing, therefore, is that you know it's just about you and writing the book you want to write. And so you don't have anything writing on it in quite the same sort of way. So I wasn't expecting Labyrinth to go global.

nobody was really. I mean, I knew my mum was going to read it. But so when you handed in your second and your third draft, did you get a sense that your publishers were really excited? Yes, everybody was really excited and thought, and I was really excited. I thought, you know, I'm a better writer now. Yeah. But it's most people who read me their favourite book of mine. And I learned to not go, oh, yeah, but, you know, chapter 10, that's so bad.

Because that's like insulting their intelligence. Yeah, yeah. And of course, you know, we get better as we get older. and that's great. But it was a joyous experience because, firstly, I hadn't really traveled very much. And because of that, I went to lots of countries I'd never been to before. And I was meeting different kinds of people. And I was talking about books all the time.

And you're going, oh, my God, this is your job. Wow. I mean, it changed my life, this book. It changed my life. And I still don't take that for granted because it's meant that everything I've been able to do is because of that moment. And that's wonderful. Very lucky. I think you're so sensible because I think that even at 43 there are people who have an overnight success.

I mean, in the field that I work in, if that happens to a comedian, a lot of them wouldn't go, okay, but at least I understand, you know, there are hundreds of people who are working at a very high level. And this recognition, you know, it's so arbitrary, awards are sort of, instead, what they would do is go, finally. I knew I was better than everyone else. It's the tall poppy syndrome, I'm afraid. and then the idea that you have to then bring people down. Or what about just letting, celebrating everybody? Was it Gould Vidal that said every time a friend of his did well, a little bit of him died inside?

You know, that's one way of living your life. It's a shame, isn't it? It's a shame because the thing is there will always be somebody more successful than you and there will always be somebody better than you, you know, if these judgments can be said to exist really. And so if you get caught up in that, the only thing that's in our control as writers, all of us sitting around this table,

is the text. That's all that you can control. Make it the best you're capable of doing as the writer you are now, as you're writing now. And it's not that you won't be devastated if it doesn't do very well or nobody reads it or whatever, but you won't feel you let yourself down. And that's all you can do. I've got a friend, brilliant writer, Megan Mascido, and she says the only thing you have control of is the process, not the outcome. What I really like, she was like, you don't have, you don't have control of what people think of the writing or what, like, all you have is your process of doing it. So that's what you just have to like,

what helps your process? That's right. And I was like, oh, such a nice way of, it's separating it. So you're not, yeah, not worrying about, because of course,

when you're writing, you can't help with him. I wonder, this draft is the best draft and anyone's ever seen. And as you email it off, you think, maybe I'm written a game changer. And then they're like,

yeah, got some notes. Oh, okay. My dad's a jazz musician who's very much in it for the music. And he says, most jazz musicians are, I think. I think it's,

you're not for the glamour? No, I think comes to the territory, you're here for the music. But the secondary cigarette smoke? My dad says, the work is the work is the work. Yeah. That's it. And also, you know, when I'm talking to younger people,

or older people indeed, who are starting out, and I say, you know, the thing is that if you get caught up in what happens to it after it's left your hands, then you will lose the joy of writing. Yeah. You know, you've got to protect your joy of writing and separate that from the consequences of the writing, Because, you know, some things go better than other things. And there's no explanation for it.

And as you said, there's not like you know as a writer, oh, like what you've written later, you consider to be better writing than Labyrinth. But that's, you have no control over what people fall in love with and when that book meets them. Yeah, exactly. What speaks to them. And also, fondness and liking isn't ever based on qualities, is it?

It's the same with people. You just can't help who you connect with them. And also, I mean, it's one of the reasons next year I'm doing a one woman theatre show inspired by Labyrinth. And, you know, and it's a show. It's not a book chat. So if you imagine it's like a cross between Simon Callow doing Dickens and Madonna. Yeah.

Without the pointy boots. Yes. But hopefully the head mic. I will indeed. Are you doing it on tour? Yes, it's on tour. So it's a six-week theatre tour up and down the country. All details on the website.

How are you feeling about it? I'm so excited because I love that because I have done a one. woman show before and I discovered it again new career in my 60s that I did really like performing. And it was great. But part of the reason I'm doing the labyrinth tour is to say thank you to readers because it is very, I mean this sounds so bleh, but it is very humbling when people come up and they say, oh, because we read Labyrinth, we went to Kakasong, I proposed to my girlfriend there. Well, someone will show your tattoo, they've gotten their arm, line from the book. And it just, it meant that for me, I thought, do you know, actually I would quite like to celebrate this anniversary,

20th anniversary, because it seems amazing it was 20 years ago. At the same time, it seems like yesterday. Also, if you are a performer or someone who enjoys performing, there's no reason to be sitting on a chair being interviewed. No. I think that with live events with books, there are people who want to come and see authors speaking. And at the moment, a lot of what they're getting delivered is quite dry. Yeah, it's just sitting on a stage for a fall, apart from Q&A at the end.

and a short reading, sometimes from someone who isn't very good at reading their own work. It's like, we can. You know, the tickets are expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People are going to come out. Give them a show.

This is a night out. And, you know, my producers are already going, Kate, can't have real fire. I know, I know this. But we can have smoke, can we? Oh, yeah, we can have a smoke machine. You know, so there'll be film and video. I mean, it will be very immersive.

So the second you walk into the auditorium, you'll feel you're in 13th century France, you know, from the music and all the rest of it. And, you know, I will love. I will love doing it. Let me talk about the women's prize, which we mentioned briefly, but that, yeah, your relationship with it, I mean, I don't know how many people know that you were involved at the start of it. I had always thought you were a successful novelist who started a prize to support other women.

No, I was starting the prize when I was a relatively, moderately, not too bad publisher. But they all kind of happened at the same time. An extraordinary moment in your life. Yeah, it was really, you know, with two young children as well. But I think that is one of the things for anyone who is a parent or a carer listening. There are two ways, aren't they? Of course you have less time. At the same time, I think that you, certainly from my point of view, you learn to use time better.

All of that, oh, you know, I don't really feel in the mood. No, if your child is asleep for 45 minutes, you work for those 45 minutes. You don't flap about the place going, am I in the mood? You know, do you write something? There is a huge restriction of time. but then it's almost like what you need to then lose is the bit where you doubt yourself. Yeah, no time to. You've got no time to... That's it just get on with it.

What happens if it doesn't go? What happens if it doesn't go well? That's what I don't have any time to consider. And I think your choice is certainly narrow. You know, you don't have time to think, oh, maybe I'm interested in that. You're like, this is what I've got an hour. This is the thing I do want to do and everything else has to go away. And so the women's prize was all very much part of that same kind of time. You know, when I just started to write and I was right, I did write two novels in that. time period as well. Of course you did, Kate. I know. I was like, and my 45 minute nap.

Yeah, of course I did. All these books and a women's prize. I am the original AI. You didn't know this. I'm actually a robot. Just when I was reading the map of bones and I was thinking about you, Kate, having sort of worked with you a little bit and been around you, so Kate has a deceptive gentleness. It's the same amount.

Which is over absolute steel. Yeah, you can tell. So she's a kind of, don't you think you're so strong, but you're absolutely The first impressions would be So nice. Just so friendly. She made everyone in the room okay. Yeah, but that person was also You don't have a page like that

Without having like, excuse me, I can only swear, you're shit together, do you know what I mean? You can't because we know Like we know when you've got kids you You know there are people who have two books And I'm proud of the two as they should be But like they should be As they should be.

And today that we're recording Which of course will not necessarily be today When people are listening But is the Booker Prize Is being announced. Now, it's interesting because they're five of the six, so we can say this without knowing who's won, are women this time. It's never happened before. One of them is the second winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Anne Michaels, who has written one novel every 10 years. And that's her process and her work and what she means. But the starting of the Women's Prize for Fiction was inspired by a Booker Prize shortest. Yes, all men. All men, which is okay in that the judges, and Sarah has been a brilliant judge, so she knows how it works. The judges have the right to choose the books that they think most fulfill the brief of the prize and speak best to them.

The point was when that booker shortlist was announced in 1991 and it was all men, nobody noticed. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't a big deal. So all you needed to do usually to look at the level playing field, the myth of the level playing field, the myth of the level playing field, is to flip it. And when you flip it, you say, can you imagine if they'd released a list of six women? Everybody would have said that was political. So that was where the prize came from, the idea that every year we would honour, celebrate,

and amplify incredible women's voices for the benefit of men, women, everybody, readers everywhere. Because readers miss out if they don't hear about all the books that are out there, if they're only hearing about a certain sector of books. I read the interview with you where you said, you know, when you first announced it, The first question a journalist asked for you was, are you a lesbian? After you announced the women's phrase. It was just like, well, there must be...

What are you doing this to meet chicks? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the only way I know how to meet them. So, yeah, any female writers want to hang out with me? No, biggie. Yeah, I mean, I just, and that's, as you say, like, 991, 92, like, we just forget how much has changed. It was very, it was, I mean, yes, absolutely.

And I think it's really important to say this, because we're sitting here in a new, world order. Women's rights are going back and being rolled back in many countries where you would never have expected that to happen. Certainly I would not have expected to see Roe v. Wade go in my lifetime. And so we know there's a lot of not good stuff going on, but it's really important to talk about all the good stuff as well, because otherwise it's just despair. So depressing. And it's not true that everything is worse. It isn't worse. So the things that I encountered when setting up the women's Prize and all of us who are involved in that. So much has changed. So when I was out during the

media round for setting up the women's prize for nonfiction last year, every interview I did, everybody said, this is amazing, Kate. This is fantastic. It's just what we need. Now, that's bittersweet because back in the 90s, it was very much, it's all over now, post-feminism rules. Everything's fair. If you're good enough, you'll get on. And some of a slightly older feminist would be going, yeah, it's not quite true, is it? They're still a gender pay gap, but they're still... And so it's bittersweet that everybody now thinks that the women's prize... Still needed, it's still important.

But it's proved itself in that it put the book, certain books that people wouldn't have found into their hands of readers who are so grateful to find them. So that, and that's the bottom line, really, isn't it? Regardless of gender, it's like, I wouldn't have found that book unless a surprise, put it on a long list or a short list and told me. What is much quieter and harder to kind of... track. But we know, because publishers and writers tell us, that when, you know, when Chimamanda Nogotia Dice won for half of Yellow Sun, the opportunities for Nigerian women to be published

immediately went up because it's, oh, people all over the world want to read a story about the Biafran Warp. And last year, the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, which was VV Ganeshanavan for Brotherless Love, that's the first Sri Lankan woman who's won a major. Prize outside of Sri Lanka. And that's really important because already you start to see, oh, maybe my book could speak to more people because that's where the Women's Prize came from in the first place, this idea, this lovely but utterly wrong idea that literature is neutral. And what that means in people's minds when you decode it is that it's written by white men. And that's what gets studied in all of these things. That's the default.

That's the default and everything else is niche. But women are not niche and actually writers from this country or that country, anything that is beautifully written is both specific and universal. That's what fiction is. It's how it works. And so that's what the prize is done

and we're all very proud of it and celebrating the 30th next year. Do you ever feel like, oh no, I can't, because I set up the prize, I can't win the prize. I've got just one for the long list. Kate, my stuff. I'll just sip it in there, sip in there. No relation.

Why don't we all take the covers off so we don't know who wrote what? I read a lovely thing you said, the best piece of advice another woman has given you and you said, Baroness Helena Kennedy, who was on your original advisory board,

said if you can't do something, never put the phone down without recommending another woman because that's the way we change things. Oh, I was like, that's just such a simple way of... Yeah. Like you said,

keep open the doors. Well, I think the important thing is, and particularly when as we're living in, you know, I used to say when I was promoting my books, and they're all historical adventures, you know, the, the ones that are inspired by history, of course. And I used to say, of course, we never know we're living through history. And now I don't say that because we do know. So we are living in extraordinary times. Quite often, therefore, it's very overwhelming for normal human beings who are not psychopaths or, you know, whatever, to think that any of us can make any

difference to what seems overwhelming. But every single one of us has a voice and every single one of us can make a difference. And you make a difference to one person and they make a difference to another person. Before you know, that's 10 women that are on a platform talking about something that wouldn't have been there before. And that's the way to do it, to understand that you don't have to be the woman on the stage with the microphone. You can be changing your village. You can be changing your street. You can be kind to somebody and give you. them an opportunity. All of these things matter as well. Sustained change comes from the grass roots up. That's more than enough. But we also want to talk about your amazing book.

Well, the segue is really, the thing you're doing in the women's prize, you're also doing with history and historical stories. Yes, that is a good segue. This whole genre, you know, probably even without noticing a lot of the time, if you're thinking about pirates or swashbuckling. It's men. It's male sailors. So the map of bones. So this is the last one of the Burning Chabers series. It is, although the map of bones is written as a standalone as well.

A lot of people haven't read the Jubei family chronicles. Right. Yes. So that's us. So we're a good example of that. We hadn't read the others. We were worried. We know what's going on. And while there might be for people who have read previous books, there's a character.

Is it Louise? Yeah, Louise and other people are mentioned. Yeah. But if you think it's just like reading a crime series, we all, you know, when we're rushing for a train and we want something fun to read on the train, you pull one out. You don't necessarily find number one of Agatha Christie.

And very deliberately, both this one and the one before the ghost ship wrote them as standalone. Oh, yeah. Well, it definitely, definitely works as a stand-alone because you're creating the world afresh. So I'm, one of the things I am is terrified of history, not because to be a woman in histories, to be so incredibly vulnerable.

And I think you're really honest about that. That's so important to you. To not gloss over. No. The thing about history is this, that women were always there. Women are not left out of the living of history, but the writing of history has left women out

and given the impression that actually women of the past didn't really do anything. They were very cloistered and all of it. It isn't true. And particularly the period of time that I'm writing about in this Eubair Family Chronicles which starts in 1562, and this novel is set in 1862 and 1688, so two different 17th and 19th century,

is that for much of the wars of religion in France, and this is the story of the Huguenot diaspora, behind all of the history, the men were at war. So all you need to do when you're trying to think about history and imagine women in that space is use your common sense. Because if the men are away at war, then who do we think opening the gates of the town in the morning or ringing the bells or acting as apothecaries or teaching the children to read or the men are not there. Keeping the business is going. Exactly. So the thing is it's the writing of history has sometimes overlooked, sometimes deliberately erased. And we're seeing that with the femicide going on in Afghanistan, for example. So we know those things. But women were always there. And women, unless they were in the tiniest fraction of society,

working as physically hard as the men. Every time you think, well, there are no women farmers in South Africa, that's simply because the name on the deed is the man, but the wife is there doing everything with her husband and is having 14 children. So the thing about the reality, and I'm really glad you pulled that out about it being, you know, difficult and awful, is that if I'm not honest about what women might have gone through,

then the reader can't make a decision about somebody's character. They don't know how brave she's being. Wow, yeah. To stand up to this. Because if I've made it clear what will happen. So this is not Hollywood, you know, you fade away. It's like if a woman is caught doing this, this is what's going to happen to her and it's really bad. Or if a woman stands up to that person, this is how, you know, violent and brutal and how unprotected she would be.

Because she has no rights. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. It's easy to be plucky if you're on a Disneyified universe where you're. you're just going to survive no matter what. You have to show the jeopardy. Because the book does start with a character being raped. And it's the beginning of a story. Yeah. So we're in France with Suzanne and her grandmother as well.

So you're immediately two extremely vulnerable people at the point of the war of religion in France. And so their house has sort of been taken over. Taken over by soldiers. And all of that's just so terrifying. I found the beginning. And that was common. Yeah. You know, by this stage in France, Huguenot is simply the name for the French Protestant.

By this stage the persecution has tipped over into genocide, which happened in every sort of persecution. And what I mean by that is that even your wealth, if you're wealthy and have high status and lots of interest, you're still not safe. And this extraordinary thing that happened was that you couldn't be a huguenot, but you weren't allowed to leave France. And if you remained a huguenot, then your children could be taken from you. And soldiers were billeted in your house and they could do whatever they wanted. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted. And that's the beginning of the story. But what's important about that prologue with Suzanne and her grandmother is.

And again, this speaks to the fortitude of women. The thing for Suzanne is the fear of it distressing or something worse happening to her grandmother. She's not actually thinking about herself thinking, oh my God, this is the worst thing. Yeah, it's coping. I mean, the reason it's amazing, is because it's someone with a trauma response who doesn't know it's a trauma response. You know, there's no time for her to do it.

She's trying to survive and cope. And that means, you know. Well, they leave. They leave everything. They take the few things that they have and they head to Amsterdam and then they get on a boat and head to South Africa

or the Cape as it is at that point. And what she's... But again, what I realise... You know, I never know. All of my fiction is very inspired by real estate. history. And it's, so if you like, I have imaginary characters unless I say they're real, set against backdrop of real history. Once I've done all the research, I sit down at my desk and I know the

sort of characters I need and I start writing and I wait to see who turns up. So I don't make a decision for that beginning or what's going to happen. I start writing and see how the story starts to develop. And what I learned very early on with Suzanne was that she has understood, as you say modern language is trauma nobody would have said that you know it would have just been a fact of life i'm afraid but she has understood the only way for her to be herself and to not let somebody else define who she is this one act to define who she is is to focus on something outside of herself and that is why she therefore is focused on her ancestor louise who was a pirate queen and the determination to find her and lay her to rest because she knows that she sailed to the cape

in 1623 on her own ship and has vanished, never been heard of again. So she understands in a very modern way that focusing on what has happened to her will be the end of her. Yeah. She needs to look beyond her experience. So at what point did you become fascinated with the Huguenots? Yeah, the Huguenots. Well, it wasn't. It was the way that fiction works for me is that phrase that I mentioned about Kakasan is the whispering and the landscape.

So what happened with this series of books is that I was in South Africa, in a place called Franchuk, which is a beautiful Cape Dutch town, about 30 kilometres east of Cape Town. And I was there in 2012 at a book festival, which is one of the great joys of being a professional writer. Off you go.

And I knew nothing about the history of Cape. The only history I knew about South Africa, like many people of my age, was the apartheid era. And I knew a little bit about the Boer War because I used to read Sherlock Holmes stories and everybody was either going to the ball, coming back in the ball. And so I followed that trail a little bit,

but I didn't really know anything. And I found myself in this beautiful town and realized that there was a French history. The main street is called Huguenot Road. And I thought this is extraordinary. How are there French people in the Cape? I knew nothing. So I went to the museum in the town

when I had a bit of time off and I discovered a piece of history that kind of blew my mind, namely that the second governor of the Cape The Cape was colonised from 1652 by the Dutch East India Company, who were the world's first multinational company. They were originally a trading company. They became, I'm afraid, a people trafficking company.

Well, very similar to the East India Company that we have in this country. Exactly. Exactly. Just earlier. And the governor, Simone van der Stel, realised that the land in the Cape was very similar to the land in South of France. And tiny little Holland, and I think this is a very wonderful story to, you know, in these times. Tiny Holland had opened their borders to the refugees.

As a result, they'd swelled their population by almost 50% with Huguenot refugees. The Huguenots were what we would now call the middle class, not a phrase that would have existed, but what I mean by that is people who worked for their living. And in France, it was a very, very old-fashioned society. The Ancien regime at the top and what they would have called the peasant at the bottom. And the Huguenots were essentially the wealth makers, you know, the people who were. who did those things. By expelling them, France bankrupted herself.

You know, religious war bankrupts, everybody war banks up every country. But Tiny Holland had opened their borders. And as a result, they became a global superpower because they took in the refugees. And so that is a wonderful thing in these very complicated times of mass migration. But what Simone Van der Stel realized was that if there were refugees in Amsterdam who were winemakers, then maybe they could come to the Cape and plant vines and make wine. So he sent a letter back to the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company saying if there are any refugees in Amsterdam from the south of France

you know how to make wine, who are prepared to come to the other side of the world, we will pay for your passage on a ship, we will pay for your families to go with you, we will pay for a French pastor to administer to your spiritual needs, and when you arrive we will give you a plot of land and alone to buy vines and tools, and 400 people sailed. And I just love the idea, not entirely, but in very large measure, the entire South African wine industry is on the shoulders of 400 impoverished, traumatised refugees.

And so that was why I was there in this graveyard. But the point was, when I came out of the museum into the graveyard, I suddenly had a really clear image of a woman in 19th century dress, which is when Franchot becomes the town we can see today, leaning forward and rubbing the lichen from a gravestone to see the name of the person buried there. And at that moment, I heard the whispering in the landscape, and I thought, oh, there's a story for me. And I thought, don't do this, Kate.

Nothing about the Huguenots. You know nothing about the 17th century. You don't know anything about South African history. And that is going to be a minefield, but it wouldn't leave me alone. And so then I thought, well, I'm going to have to go back to the beginning of the wars of religion to understand it. So then I went back and wrote the Burning Chambers 15 and 62. But the point is when I told my publisher that story of the woman that I could see in my mind's eye in the graveyard, when I was leaving the room, they said, we can't wait to discover who she is.

And I thought, you and me both because I didn't know. And it's only in this book that I learned who she was. And of course that comes out of all of my work, which is about putting women back into history because there's always a woman behind the history that you're not being told. And the thing about Isabel La Padubert in the 19th century part is she's very much inspired by all those female explorers of that age. You know, Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bird, you know, all of those extraordinary women who made very interesting decisions, not least of all, Isabel has made a decision that she will not marry and will not have children. And so what I discovered as I continued to write the book was that in the end, the Map of Bones is about the power of women writing.

Because Isabella's understood if she does not write the story of the Jubei family down, in other words, the Jubei family chronicles, their voices will vanish. In terms of history, have you ever had a sticky situation where you've got factual accuracy and what will work for the story and you have to make a decision between the two? I never muck with the history Yeah I didn't think you did No because we know That history Fake history

Dare I say the phrase And the distortion of history Is used to justify Bigotry and Prejudice now We're seeing that to happen And also it would be so dangerous Because Because it's clear

How much research you've done into it I'm you know Your reader trusts you as a historical source As someone who's done lots of research So if you even fudge one detail That's added in with the rest They don't know to go, oh, that's right. I mean, what I do, I often have quite an extensive author's note.

So I will say things like, you know, the ship that Suzanne and Florence arrive on is a real ship. The names of the other passengers are real, you know, from the Dutch East India records. But obviously Suzanne and Florence are imagined. So I'm, if I'm adding somebody into a situation that is real, I say so. With this one, with the map of bones, there are more real people. in it than I normally have. So a character I loved writing is Adrian, who is the man. Oh yeah, he's so great. And he's lovely because he's just a lost man who doesn't want to be on the other side of the world and he's suffered greatly as well. But he finds a new way to live.

I so love, it's so important that you have good men as well. Oh, absolutely. That men aren't just the enemy and they are also some of them victims. I mean, I think the important thing about lovely men is men and women built the world together. My project, is putting women back into history. It is not taking men out of history. There are many gorgeous, wonderful, brilliant men and many gorgeous, wonderful women. There is some appalling men, and there's some pretty grim women. The point is about structures, let's call it to patriarchy, that oppresses almost everybody, but benefits some people more than others. And when I was trying to explain to my lovely dad about, you know, the sort of books I was writing and I was writing adventure stories,

but the women, you know, were at the heart of them and writing about history and putting women back into history. My dad, who was born in 1924 and was an English gent of a quite traditional kind in many, many ways. He got it straight away. He just said, oh, I see, darling, it's just about getting a bigger table and more chairs. Wow.

That's it, you know. And the point is about the way that I write is that, therefore it's incredibly important that they're a gorgeous men because they are in this as well. And being very black and white about things that all of these people are good and all the... We know that we end up where we are in the world today. The easy answer is without nuance. The easy answer is at the end point extremism.

It always is. So the point about having good and bad characters of all different types, that's the world that everybody lives in. And it's very interesting that when I do events, I've done obviously a lot of events for the Map of Bones, my audience isn't 50-50 but it's probably a third man which is unusual

for a woman writer who has women need characters and male readers in general I mean it's the same with women but they tend to read men yeah because partly the sense is again that women are just writing for women but literature with capital L is for everybody and so it's one of the reasons

I mean obviously we're not visual here but my jackets are very deliberately not clearly geared to people who like these kind of books. I don't have women in big hats wandering around the place. It's not sweltering bosoms. It's not sweltering bosoms. Yeah, looking out onto the sea. I mean, I've got some swords, obviously, on the front. But then everybody's got a weapon in my book, you know. Because you're so well informed and you feel so passionately about current events, do you ever have a temptation to set a book now? Or is it because of the sort of the genres

that you enjoy writing? Yeah, that's a great question. And I suppose it's, I think there are so many fantastic writers bringing today's world to life. And there will be some that will bring, you know, there's a thing called the 10-year rule. It's not a rule. It's just an observation, which is that there are, when something momentous and terrible is happening or big is happening in the world, there's often quite a lot of writing at the time. The First World War is the most obvious example of this. And then quite often there is a silence of about 10 years while people then reflect to look back on it.

So one of them, I would say probably the best anti-war novel of all time is All Quiet on the Western Front, written in 28 and published in 29. And it has one of the most extraordinary final paragraphs. And it's so simple and it's just he died on a day when all was quiet on the Western Front. You know, that heartbreaking thing that actually the war is over, but the message hasn't gone through and your child dies that day. In terms of modern day, I am passionate about telling the truth of the past.

And I think I'm strongest at bringing the past to life. I feel other people are commentating very, very well and I'm enjoying reading their books. You know, I would never say never in that it does depend who turns up. And I know that the next series of novels will be crime. Crime is exciting, isn't it? Crime is exciting, but of course, to your previous question, immediately I knew it wasn't now. Yeah. And what has happened is that I've been given access to what we would call a chai girl born and bread. You know, I live in Chichester, went to school in Chichester, went away from Chichester, came back to Chichester, you know, and I've been given access to Sussex's cold cases.

Oh, wow. And so unsolved murders of Sussex, of which there were not actually that many, I'm glad to say. but so I know there's a case in 1910 there's a case in the 1920s, a case in the 1940s but I can't let myself think about these yet Are they whispering already? I can't let them in because I've got to do things in order and I've got other things to do first

and if you write like I do which is very immersive and I just plunge in and when I'm writing a first draft I work eight hours a day, seven days a week I'm just on it if you go half in and half out you make it stale Are you sad to say goodbye? Or do you feel like this, I'm happy. This is the story I wanted to say.

Over my years of doing women's prize and being a publisher and being a writer myself, I have come to the conclusion that characters stay longer in the reader's heart than they do in the writer's heart. Yeah. Actually, because we all have characters that mean such a lot to us when we're reading. When you're writing, of course you're fixated on them when you're writing them. But for me, each book kind of becomes real when it's in the reader's hands. And I do let them go, actually. Kate, thank you so much.

I love talking to you. I love to read anyway, but Map of Bones is out now. It's such a great read. It's such an interesting period of history. And I just, yeah, we really, really enjoyed it. But thank you for talking to us about all the amazing things you're involved in. Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you for listening to The Weirdo's Book Club. The Map of Bones is available to buy now. and if you want more information on her live show happening in 2025, head to her website. Carriad's children's book, The Christmas Wish Tastrophe, is available now for all stockings or main gifts. And Sarah's novel Weirdo is also available for stockings or under the tree purchases. Also, I'm going on tour. If you'd like to come to see my stand-up comedy, it's called I Am a Strange Gloop. It's going all over Britain, and you can go to sarah pascoe.combe.uk for tickets. You can find out that the upcoming books we're going to be discussing on our Instagram at Sarah and Carriad's Weirdo's Book Club.

Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you.