Former New College student Kate Mosse on her new book 'The Taxidermist's Daughter'

I didn’t sleep a wink the night before my interview with Kate Mosse, frantically reading her latest book The Taxidermist’s Daughter, and then lying awake all night in terror.

She is delighted when I tell her this, her gothic novel having the desired effect.

Not that my story is original, Kate’s books’ popularity speaking for themselves – the internationally bestselling author achieving sales of more than five million, her novels being translated into 42 languages.

She is also the co-founder of the Board of the Baileys Womens Prize for Fiction, on the board at The National and, in June 2013, was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

But what of the woman herself? Who is this petite blonde who terrorises her readers and burrows deep into their psyches?

How affected is she by the gruesome content of her novels and where does it come from? Is she attracted to the dark side herself?

Not a bit of it, the Kate Mosse I talk to is a world away from the dark murderous characters she thrives on, despite her obvious attraction to the genre: “I am a huge fan of gothic fiction but it needs to be very particular – it needs to be dark, have a pathological thread, a constant threat, a scientific element, in this case taxidermy, and a revenge aspect, combined with good old-fashioned story-telling and a few guilty secrets. But it is not horror.”

And yet The Taxidermist’s Daughter is a terrifyingly visual read. “Yes, I was quite surprised how scary it turned out to be and how graphic it was, but then a novel tells you what it needs to be. The characters always have their own stories to tell,” she says as if merely the scribe.

Kate’s foray into gothic fiction is a brief lull before she gets back to the serious business of writing her historical novels (Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel), the research for each book taking several years, the writing 18 months, which is why she’s enjoyed the respite: “My historical fiction is explicitly violent but it is a real reflection of what happened, while gothic fiction is imagined so I had enormous pleasure writing this and it was very quick.”

Based in Sussex, where she grew up, Kate even embarked on a taxidermy course to make sure her story was as realistic as possible. “I didn’t enjoy it,” she points out, “but then I’m a vegetarian - it was the smell which got me.”

Oxford is also familiar territory however because it was here that Kate studied English at New College: “Oxford introduced me to gothic fiction and the history of books in general. I had an incredible time there,” she says.

Going into publishing, Kate wrote four books before Labyrinth came out and she was finally able to give up the day job to write full-time. Famous for getting up at 4am, “when I’m most creative” she still manages to juggle a family alongside her burgeoning career.

“I do find writing utterly absorbing, so I don’t get lonely. I have a busy house with people coming in and out, and three generations living under one roof. In fact I can’t remember the last time I was home alone.”

But when she does want to escape, Kate bolts to her house in France, the landscape for her Carcassonne novels, where ironically you can now do a Kate Mosse tour, such is her fame, even over there. “None of the locals can believe it. They still stop me in the street and say ‘is it really you?’”

SEE IT
Kate Mosse comes to discuss The Taxidermist’s Daughter at 7pm on Tuesday at Blackwell’s in Oxford. For more information see bookshop.blackwell.co.uk or call 01865 333623

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