Book Review of The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse (Book Four of The Joubert Family Chronicles)

HARDCOVER

PUBLICATION DATE 10 October 2024

PRINT LENGTH 480 pages

PUBLISHER MANTLE

Olifantshoek, Southern Africa, 1688. When the violent Cape wind blows from the south-east, they say the voices of the unquiet dead can be heard whispering through the deserted valley. Suzanne Joubert, a Huguenot refugee from war-torn France, arrives in search of her cousin — the notorious she-captain and pirate commander Louise Reydon-Joubert — who landed at the Cape of Good Hope more than sixty years before, then disappeared without a trace . . .

Franschhoek, Southern Africa, 1862. Nearly one hundred and eighty years after Suzanne’s perilous journey, another intrepid and courageous woman of the Joubert family — Isabelle Lepard — has journeyed to the small frontier town once known as Oliftantshoek in search of her long-lost relations. Intent on putting the women of her family back into the history books, she quickly discovers that the crimes and tragedies still shadow the present. And now, Isabelle faces a race against time if she is to discover the truth, and escape with her life . . .

In France, the women would not have been friends. They would have had nothing in common. Their lives would not have crossed. But here, refugees all, different alliances were being created. Only they knew what it was like never to feel safe, to understand that one's home was not always a sanctuary.

Isabelle was descended from one of the great, lost, Huguenot families of France and was in sole possession of the substantial archive passed down through the family by Suzanne Joubert and her Lepard descendants.  The collection-which contained all of Minou's journals, Louise's prison diary and Suzanne's notebooks, written over many years in England-told  of the Joubert family's flight from Carcassone to Puivert, Puivert to Paris, Paris to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to the Cape and back again. But the key piece of the story, what had happened when Louise and Gilles first set foot in the Cape, was still missing. Isabelle intended to solve that mystery and then endow her own Family Archive and Reading Room.  A space open to all, dedicated to the history of the women of her family. 

The Map of Bones is set against the backdrop of the Huguenot Diaspora during the Wars of Religion in France.  It is a story about refugees; about people arriving in an unknown land and building a new country.  It is also a book about the consequences of religious war and faith but it is not a book about faith.  It's about finding out what folks will do for good or evil. 

At the heart of The Map of Bones, are the lives of two generations of families, refugees, and many more women who have survived trauma, illness, and grief, so they can pass down their stories from generation to generation. These women and so many others are lost to the passage of time or are never remembered at all; having the men's life histories be written and recorded for all time. 

Kate Mosse writes with one hand in the past, one hand in the present and her heart and soul connected down through the ages bringing her readership women who are no longer forgotten and unnamed. Now they are heard, seen and loved for all  time.  

Thank you to Mantle Pan Macmillan in London for my review copy.

The Map of Bones is published in the United Kingdom now in your local bookshop or online.