There was something very pleasing about the runaway success of Kate Mosse’s last novel, The Ghost Ship, the third of her Joubert family chronicles. The book received little critical attention but was glowingly reviewed by bloggers and became a publicist’s dream: the word-of-mouth bestseller. I interviewed Mosse at Faversham literary festival soon after the book was published and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the room that was easy to understand. Mosse has always been a wonderfully fluent and engaging writer, and here was a novel that drew on classic adventure tales from Robert Louis Stevenson to John Meade Falkner and delivered an explosive and propulsive story of life on the high seas.
Mosse’s newest book is the last in the Joubert quartet. The novel opens in 1688, with Suzanne Joubert, a Huguenot refugee, arriving at the Cape of Good Hope. While her immediate goal is survival in this unfamiliar and often hostile land, Suzanne harbours a deeper, more personal mission: to uncover the fate of her ancestor, Louise Reydon-Joubert, the brilliant she-captain hero of The Ghost Ship. This quest, blending adventure and historical intrigue, drives much of the novel’s narrative energy. Suzanne’s resilience in the face of danger and her dogged determination to uncover Louise’s fate make her one of Mosse’s most compelling protagonists, continuing the author’s tradition of presenting strong, independent women as agents of a history from which they have for too long been obscured.
