The Burning Chambers (The Joubert Family Chronicles)

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Kate is the Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and in June 2013, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature. For 35 years in the Languedoc and Toulouse, Catholics and Huguenots (protestants) ripped each other to shreds in violent battles, secret assassinations, and appalling physical torture. Beginning in Carcassonne in 1562, The Burning Chambers is a thrilling adventure and a heartbreaking love story set against the backdrop of the religious wars in France. At the heart of providing care, lie everyday acts of love and the realisation that, at some point in our lives, most of us will come to rely on an extra pair of hands. I knew nothing about this period of French history or the conflict between the Catholics and the Huguenots.The prologue and part of the epilogue are the only two sections which relate to the larger series, the only bits which tell the reader there's more than this book as a standalone, and it's not clear that this is what they're for.

The secondary characters are deftly sketched in, like Minou’s siblings: resourceful seven-year-old Alis and mischievous, restless teenager Aimeric. In light of thousands dying, how do we remember to value the life of each individual on his or her own merits? The story is well-written with some moments that stand out, such as the great dialogue or concise yet beautiful descriptions of scenery.Blanche hopes to retain the Puivert lands and titles by producing an heir, although she is pregnant not by Bruyère but by her lover, Vidal, a priest (who also happens to be Piet’s estranged friend). But this massive historical saga will obviously continue in Mosse’s second, third and fourth instalments of this quartet. Labyrinth tells the story of Alais and Alice – the first a young woman in thirteenth-century Carcassone who is given a strange book by her father which purports to hold the mystery of the true Grail, the second who discovers two skeletons in a cave in the French Pyrenees in 2005. Their relationship places them in great danger; Minou has received a cryptic, threatening note bearing an unknown seal. He is mistaken, for in Toulouse, the fires of religious conflict are blazing out of control, with neighbour turning on neighbour, and where old friendships are destined to turn into fatal enmities.

Ana, a young Spanish woman, lives in a small town on the north-west coast of Tenerife which lies in the shadow of a mighty volcano. For Piet has a dangerous mission of his own, and he will need Minou's help if he is to get out of La Cite alive . In 2006, she was nominated for a Quill Award and won the British Book Awards Best Read of the Year for Labyrinth. Her books have been translated into thirty-seven languages and published in more than forty countries.The mystery itself and the romance work quite well, but the strength of this book is Mosse’s extensive knowledge and evocative description of the beautiful region in which it is set and the intricacies of the religious problem. In 1891, seventeen-year-old Leonie Vernier, having fled Paris for the sanctuary of her aunt's house near Carcassonne, soon stumbles across a ruined sepulchre and a mystery whose traces are written in blood. But this volume is rooted 300 years earlier in the Languedoc, in the city of Carcassonne that Mosse brought so vividly to life in her earlier books, and in Toulouse, where in 1562 the tensions between Catholics and Protestants spilled into violence that fuelled 35 years of civil war. I can’t remember how old I was – if it was pre or post university, but I do believe it was the first – and last – time I would tear a page out of a book. A lo largo de una lectura llena de secretos familiares, lealtades y traiciones, la autora construye una impactante historia a través de personajes fuertes y muy bien desarrollados, que al igual que Los pilares de la tierra I de Ken Follett, encontraremos héroes, villanos, y las víctimas de todo enfrentamiento.