Non-Fiction
Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World
A journey through history of the women who built the world, but whom the world forgot
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Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries brings together Kate’s rich and detailed knowledge of unheard and under-heard women’s history, and of how and why women’s achievements have routinely been omitted from the history books. This beautiful illustrated book is both an alternative feminist history of the world and a personal memoir about the nature of women’s struggles to be heard, about how history is made and by whom.
Split into ten sections, each covering a different category of women’s achievements in history, Kate Mosse tells the stories of female inventors and scientists, philanthropists and conservationists, authors and campaigners. It is the most accessible narrative non-fiction with a genuinely diverse, truly global perspective featuring names such as Sophie Scholl, Mary Seacole, Cornelia Sorabji, Helen Suzman, Shirley Chisholm, and Violette Szabo. And in deeply personal passages Kate writes about the life of her great-grandmother, Lily Watson, where she turns detective to find out why she has all but disappeared from the record.
An Extra Pair of Hands
'Inspiring' GUARDIAN
'Heartbreaking' INDEPENDENT
'I loved it' ADAM KAY
'Beautiful' MATT HAIG
'Luminous' NICCI GERRARD
'Essential reading' MADELEINE BUNTING
'A celebration' CHRISTIE WATSON
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A Best Book for Summer in The Times, Guardian and The i
Independent Book of the Month
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Caring is an issue that affects us all - as bestselling novelist Kate Mosse knows all too well.
Kate has cared in turn for her father and mother, and for Granny Rosie, her 90-year-old mother-in-law. Along the way she has experienced the joys, challenges and frustrations shared by an invisible army of carers.
At the heart of this care lie everyday acts of love, and the realisation that, sooner or later, most of us will come to rely on an extra pair of hands.
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'Lifts the spirits without pulling punches' IAN RANKIN
'Irresistible' RACHEL JOYCE
'Questions how and why we fetishise independence when the reality of human experience is always interdependence' GUARDIAN, BOOK OF THE DAY
'Heartfelt, funny and at times heartbreaking. 10/10' INDEPENDENT
'Utterly beautiful' FRANCESCA SEGAL
Plays
The Taxidermist’s Daughter
Chichester Festival Theatre, 8 – 30 April 2022
World Premiere.
Adapted by the author from her No 1 bestselling novel, a Gothic thriller of revenge and secrets set in Fishbourne in 1912 as the flood waters are rising.
Connie Gifford lives alone with her father in what remains of his once famous taxidermy museum. Robbed of her memory by a childhood accident, Connie starts to realise that the past has a long shadow and a conspiracy to cover up a crime committed ten years ago threatens to destroy her calm of the Sussex village. A story of revenge and cold justice, set in the atmospheric landscape of the Fishbourne Marshes, the play asks the question of what a woman should do when the people who should stand up for justice are the very men she should most fear.
Opening the 60th anniversary season at Chichester Festival Theatre, Kate’s home town, this innovative and dazzling production is directed by Roisin McBrinn, joint artistic director of Clean Break Theatre Company, and designed by Paul Wills.
Script published by Nick Hern Books, 2022
The Queen of Jerusalem
Venue to be confirmed, Spring 2024
A major commission celebrating Melisende, the extraordinary 12th century Queen of Jerusalem, who ruled over the Holy Land during one of the most turbulent centuries in history, with the support – and sometimes the opposition – of her sisters. This is untold women’s history of the Crusader Era.
Syrinx
Sky Theatre Arts Live, 2009
Commissioned by Sandi Toksvig for Sky Theatre Arts Live, Syrinx is Kate’s first play.
A one-act, 30 minute drama, for four actresses. Set in the present day, in a head teacher’s office before the school Prize Giving, it’s a story of haunting and female friendship. The headteacher is retiring and has decided to use the opportunity to bring together her two oldest school friends to repair the breakdown in their friendship following a tragedy some years before.
A story of grief and remembering, about the ‘What If’ moments in life, Syrinx had its debut at the Sky Television Studios in London in July 2009 directed by Patrick Sandford. Since then, it has had many amateur productions.
Endpapers
The Bush Theatre, 2011
To celebrate the reopening of the Bush Theatre in London, Artistic Director Josie Rourke commissioned Sixty Six Books, a sequence of dramatic monologues interpreting each of the books of the King James Bible to celebrate its 400th year. Kate’s text was the final book of the New Testament, The Book of Revelation, and was directed by Philip Franks. Other authors included Jeanette Winterson, Anne Michaels, Stella Duffy, Andrew Motion, Wole Soyinka, Jackie Kay, Neil la Bute, Owen Sheers, Moira Buffini, Kwame Kweih Armah, Carol Anne Duffy, Toby Litt, Billy Bragg, Archbishop Rowan Williams, Brian Chikwava, Kamila Shamsie and David Edgar.
Kate Mosse answers some questions about The Book of Revelation here.