photo: Roderick Field
Kate Mosse is the author of the thrillers Labyrinth and Sepulchre-which have sold millions of copies in more than 40 countries-a playwright and nonfiction writer. She is co-founder of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction international literary award, and serves on the board of the National Theatre in London and the advisory board of Women of the World. Mosse won the Spirit of Everywoman Award in 2012 and was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2013. Mosse divides her time between Carcassonne, France, and Sussex, England, where she lives with her husband, grown-up children (sometimes!), her mother, mother-in-law and a small white West Highland terrier. Her new novel is Citadel (Morrow, March 18, 2014).
on your nightstand now:
You are reading: Bound to be read books
The Daily Rituals of Mason Currey, a snapshot of the weird, wonderful and downright quirky routines that writers, artists, musicians and choreographers have to get into their creative zone. some I share (getting up at 4am, for example, with a very strong black coffee), others are a bit eccentric!
Favorite book when you were a child:
little women, what else! the four March sisters and with a writer, the independent and determined jo, at the heart of the novel. surprising that it is both of its time and yet incredibly current, almost 150 years later.
your top five authors:
Hard for any writer to answer (and not lose friends!), so I’ll go with my favorite “legacy” (ie no longer alive!) authors: the invaluable willa cather, the elegiac t.s. eliot, the great french short story writer guy de maupassant, the adventurer h. Rider Haggard (of her fame and of King Solomon’s Mines) and, predictably for an English writer of a certain age, the inimitable Agatha Christie.
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book you pretended to read:
nothing honest! why do that? it’s silly on the other hand, the list of novels I started but couldn’t finish, well… if I confess, all credibility goes out the window!
Book you’re an evangelist for:
wuthering heights by emily bronte. her only novel, published in 1847, the year before she died, is a startling tour-de-force that changes every time you read it. It’s about revenge and obsession, strong female characters, race and class, all set against the brutal and unforgiving landscape of the Yorkshire moors. even now the last paragraph still makes me cry! beautiful.
book you bought for the cover:
again, none, although I admire the great artwork on the cover. You see, I used to be an editor, so I learned the tired old cliché of never judging a book by its cover, that was good advice.
book that changed your life:
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toni morrison is the bluest eye. Growing up in a charming, if old-fashioned, corner of the UK. in the 1960s and 1970s, I had never consciously registered that some people genuinely thought that women and men should have different rights or that the color of a person’s skin should be a reason for discrimination, injustice. morrison’s brilliant novel opened my eyes….
favorite line from a book:
“what will survive of us is love”. -from philip larkin’s poem “a tomb of arundel”
when researching for citadel, the story of a women’s resistance unit during world war ii in france, i saw that it was love – to family, to friends, to country – that gave women and men the strength to keep fighting.
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Book you would most like to read again for the first time:
so many, it’s that thrill of discovery, so hard to recapture, but top of the list would be adrienne rich’s poem “diving into the wreck”, milton’s paradise lost, the ghost stories of m.r. james, erich maria remarque it’s all quiet on the western front, marilyn french is in the ladies’ room, george eliot is in the floss mill….
Why we like “best of” book lists:
for the feeling of connection it gives us with other writers, other readers. for the evidence that words, when all is said and done, survive and endure and speak beyond the generations, beyond the background. but it is good to remember that our lists will change: it is about the chemistry of time, place, context and the person we are when we read. tomorrow things may be different.
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