The Map of Bones

I kept thinking about Hilary Mantel’s Reith lectures as I was reading The Joubert Family Chronicles. Mantel spoke about fact and fiction being blended in her work like olive oil and egg yolk in mayonnaise – you can’t return them to their original states. Here, Mosse gives us both the satisfying intricacy of historical fact and a fictional narrative that carries us along at a rollicking pace. The long, rich, tragic history of the Huguenots deserved a series of novels as brilliant and well researched as these, in which the past is felt deep in the reader’s bonesThe Observer

The fourth and final instalment in Mosse’s Joubert Family Chronicles . . . this is adventure-stuffed historical fiction in the grand traditionThe Telegraph

[The Map of Bones] demonstrates Mosse’s skill in constructing a multi-stranded narrative and filling it with memorable charactersThe Sunday Times

The fourth instalment in Mosse’s Joubert Family Chronicles is a fittingly terrific conclusion, with intrepid women, perilous journeys, a search for the truth, and a narrative spanning 17th to 19th century South Africai