Interview with Kate Mosse, appearing at the Chiswick Book Festival 2026

Kate Mosse’s book ‘Autumn’ is out this week

Four books, by celebrated authors, celebrating the seasons of the year

As a child, some of my favourite books were the Ladybird series on the four seasons. The pictures were stunning and are so embedded in my memory I now can’t work out which are the real life images of the seasons I ‘remember’ from my childhood and which come from those illustrations.

A new series of books to celebrate the changing seasons is the literary equivalent of those Ladybird books: Spring, by Michael Morpurgo, Summer, by Bernardine Evaristo, Autumn by Kate Mosse and Winter by Val McDermid.

Autumn is published this week, and Kate Mosse will be at the Chiswick Book Festival on Friday 11 September to talk about it in a session sponsored by The Chiswick Calendar.

She talked to me about Autumn, which she wrote this time last year, and about the book she is currently writing – an adventure thriller which marks a return to the medieval world of France and England, 20 years on from the launch of her breakthrough book Labyrinth, the first of the best-selling Languedoc trilogy.

Top: The Ladybird children’s books ‘What to look for in … Spring / Summer / Autumn / Winter’.
Bottom: Spring; Michael Morpugo; Bernadine Evaristo; Winter; Val Dermid

“This great gang of writers” – Michael Morpurgo, Bernardine Evaristo, Val McDermid and Kate Mosse

“I’ve never written a book that is so gentle and reflective”, she told me. “Or one that’s so short. It’s gentle and small and very personal.

“It felt a real joy to be part of this great gang of writers. I, at 65, am the youngest. I feel we are all old timers. Michael has written about a season on his farm. He gives city kids an opportunity to visit a country farm and has been doing that for 50 years. He’s now in his eighties.

“Val has written about the long Scottish winter. In fact, she has pinched a couple of my months, as she pointed out the Scottish winter starts earlier, so her book starts in October. Bernie, I imagine will be writing about a summer in the city. Her book isn’t out until next year”.

Winter and Spring were published last year and eventually all four will be available as a collection.

“The publishers played a blinder because we all thought we had been given first choice of the season we wanted.

“For all of us, it has been a joy to write”.

Autumn leaves – Photograph of the day by Jon Perry, enlightenshade

Photograph Jon Perry

Autumn, by Kate Mosse – ‘a love letter to my favourite season…  it is also a love letter to Sussex.

Autumn is a joy to read too. As a fan of Kate’s historical fiction – great sweeping family sagas that span the centuries with exciting, page-turning stories, I wasn’t sure how I would feel about a gentle, reflective book about a season, but it is just a lovely thing to immerse yourself in for a few hours’ peaceful reading – like soaking in a warm bath with lots of scented bath oil.

The book starts with her memory of going to school for the first time at the age of four.

‘I understood that my life was about to expand. Become bigger, brighter, more varied. Today was a new beginning …

‘Every September, when the leaves turn to copper and there is dew on the grass in the early morning, I still have that same spike of expectation and anticipation’.

It does what it says in the title – it is an exploration of the season of autumn, with separate chapters on September, October and November: ‘a love letter to my favourite season. It is also a love letter to Sussex’.

I wondered how she would spin that out into a whole book, but she does, quite seamlessly blending her own memories and her family’s experiences and recollections with descriptions of her garden and the surrounding countryside, and with folklore and history.

She describes it as ‘not a daily diary or a journal’, though she does tell us what she’s doing on specific dates; ‘not a comprehensive guide to Sussex folklore nor a nature guide to the season, but rather a personal almanac of thoughts, sights, facts, mythologies, memories’.

Photograph Jon Perry

“I think everybody has a favourite season”

It is quite literary, with references to Keats’ season of ‘mellow fruitfulness’, to William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, and to Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Sussex’, amongst others.

It has historical references to the Old Testament, the Doomsday Book and The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, and mythical references to Norse and Chinese lore, but in no way is it pretentious. Every reference is short and apposite, her knowledge of them a framework of reference that is just a part of who she is.

“I think everybody has a favourite season”, she told me, and many people have told her theirs is also the autumn; (it is mine).

“When the wider world is so challenging, there’s a peace about the continuity of the changing seasons… The rhythm of the seasons that has existed since the world began … That the world will keep on turning regardless of what human beings get up to”.

Photograph Jon Perry

“A sense of belonging is fundamental to our wellbeing”

There is also solace in where we grew up, she says:

“A sense of belonging, loving where you came from, that makes you grounded, happier, less buffeted by big events over which we have no control.

“A sense of belonging is fundamental to our wellbeing. Most people will have a place that means something more than just opening the door and walking in”.

For her, that place is her beloved West Sussex. She describes her walks on the Sussex Downs and through the Marshes.

Photograph Aila Cinar

A kaleidoscope of colour

Kate Mosse’s writing is lyrical and evocative:

‘The garden is a kaleidoscope of sage, emerald, jade, fern, aquamarine, cyan, the colours swaying and dancing every time the wind blows’.

She delves into etymology to find suitably autumnal words, borrowing from W.D. Parish’s Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect, which lists more than thirty different Sussex terms for mud, ‘clodgy and slabby among them’, to describe her muddy October walk through the Marshes.

‘A few days after my visit to the Marshes, Storm Amy came bellowing in and turned these same paths to ‘slub’.’

“I am often asked which is my favourite walk”, she told me. “But it depends when. Everyone has always thought Sussex is the muddiest county. If it’s very wet, the Fishbourne marshes are impassable”.

The importance of landscape and folklore

She has a passion for how landscape and folklore go hand in hand, which is evident in all her books.

“I think folklore is the closest we come to the history of ordinary people. Folklore, legends, myths, are all fragments of history”.

She references a book her father owned: the Readers Digest Book of the Myths and Legends of the British Isles. As a child, she writes, she loved reading about the witches and giants that peopled these shores in days gone by, and the ghosts that recall former lives.

I told her I also owned a copy of it, which I have had since I was a teenager.

“That book was so influential. We had a copy in our house, and it got lost. My husband found a second-hand copy in a bookshop. The number of people who know this book is quite extraordinary”.

Next book – Borderlands

As a fan of Kate Mosse’s historical fiction I was interested to read her comment:

‘Looking back, I can see how the roots of my becoming a writer – that combination of landscape and history and storytelling – lie here in that Sussex childhood…

‘Everything changes, but there is a constancy in this shifting, obdurate landscape which links everything’.

She is in the closing stages of writing her next book, Borderlands, in which she returns to the medieval period for the first time in 20 years.

“It is an adventure thriller, a medieval / modern time slip between 1064 / 66 and the modern day, set in the Mont St Michel and Sussex”.

She has traced her own family tree back to 1066 and William de Mosse, who came over with the Normans and settled in Sussex. Her husband, she told me, had discovered his dna came from “entirely within a 50-mile area – so he’s a true Saxon”.

Those are some impressive roots. No wonder she feels grounded in West Sussex.

Borderlands comes out next year, which will be the thousandth annniversary of the birth of William the Conqueror.

“Next year will be Norman year”.