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With its secret societies, ancient conspiracies and references to the Holy Grail, Kate Mosse's breakthrough 2005 third novel Labyrinth was inevitably compared to Dan Brown's bestselling The Da Vinci Code.
But, as her recently published follow-up Sepulchre demonstrates, the Chichester-based 46-year-old has just as much in common with
her good friend Joanne Harris.
Both authors prefer to set their stories in France rather than their native England and, like The Lollipop Shoes, Harris' recent sequel to Chocolat, Sepulchre takes place around Halloween.
"I'm really happy to be compared to The Da Vinci Code," Mosse tells me when I meet her in the library of the Covent Garden Hotel.
"Dan Brown has done an enormous amount for reading. An awful lot of people got turned back onto reading novels because of that book.
"Before Labyrinth came out, we were a bit worried that sort of story might have had its day. I'd been working on Labyrinth for 10 years when The Da Vinci Code came out, so it was obviously a bit of a shocker but in hindsight, it helped me enormously."
She is also philosophical about being constantly confused with Kate Moss - one reporter even asked if the supermodel's on/off boyfriend Pete Doherty would be accompanying her to the Orange Prize, the annual awards for women's fiction which Mosse co-founded.
"Kate is a gorgeous and wonderful person," laughs Mosse.
"I've never actually met her but it's fine having a name like that. Mine is obviously spelt differently although it's pronounced the same. There are often misunderstandings. Taxi drivers will pick me up and their faces will fall a bit. Then they'll feel obliged to be very gallant: 'you're much better looking'."
Unlike the linear Da Vinci Code, Mosse's books are "timeslip novels", with the narratives of their interweaving storylines divided between two separate centuries.
"An important aspect of my books is the idea that although things do happen specifically in a place and time, echoes of what has happened linger for much longer," says Mosse.
"A lot of adventure writing - which is what I do - shares many characteristics with science fiction writers, who have a strong sense of an alternate reality; an imagined world as opposed to the domestic world."
Like Labyrinth, Sepulchre is mostly set in Carcassonne, a small village in southwest French, which also features in The Da Vinci Code.
"We have a small house in Carcassonne," says Mosse, whose bilingual husband Greg helps with her research. "A lot of people have favourite places. It might be Devon or Spain but for us it's France. As a writer, I find that France is the landscape of my imagination.
"Labyrinth was very much a love letter to Carcassonne. It was very positive about the landscape whereas Sepulchre is much more of an autumn book. It's very much about the woods, the trees and those ancient places and is more ambivalent about the landscape. Certainly when I'm there and I'm walking through the woods, I find that fantastically uplifting but I do realise that I'm also looking over my shoulder. It doesn't seem unlikely that there are devils hiding in the woods."
While Labyrinth harked back to the Middle Ages, Sepulchre's historical section occurs much closer to the present, in 1891. It opens in Paris with brother and sister Leonie and Anatole Vernier seeking sanctuary in Carcassonne after being caught up in the riots that swept the French capital in the heady last days of the 19th century.
Leonie and Anatole stumble across a ruined Visigoth sepulchre in a nearby wood and uncover an ancient mystery, which the novel's contemporary character, American researcher Meredith Martin, is also affected by 125 years later.
"I like churches and tombs," says Mosse. "I like the sense of all the stories that they carry within them. Obviously, if you need things to be buried and go missing, you can't do much better than a ruined space in the middle of the woods in southwest France, Spain, Italy or any of those Catholic countries."
Visitors to Carcassonne can participate in The Da Vinci Code-themed tours of the area. However, anyone hoping to explore the ancient ruins of Mosse's book will be in for a wasted journey.
"I write stories that are driven by imagination and set in real places but I have already had to say that the sepulchre at the centre of this story doesn't exist," laughs Mosse.
- Detours, HoS
