Blog Tour: The City of Tears – Kate Mosse

The City of Tears – Book 2 – Paris, August 1572 Minou Joubert and her family are in Paris for a Royal Wedding, an alliance between the Catholic Crown and the Huguenot King of Navarre intended to bring peace to France after a decade of religious wars. So too is their oldest enemy, Vidal, still in pursuit of a relic that will change the course of history. But within days of the marriage, thousands will lie dead in the streets and Minou’s beloved family will be scattered to the four winds and one of her beloved children will have disappeared without trace . . .

A breath-taking novel of revenge, persecution and loss, sweeping from Paris and Chartres to the City of Tears itself – the great refugee city of Amsterdam – this is a story of one family’s fight to stay together, to survive and to find each other, against the devastating tides of history . . .

“The Burning Chambers is a sequence of novels set against the backdrop of three hundred years of history, from sixteenth century France to nineteenth-century Southern Africa. The characters and their families, unless otherwise specified, are imagined, though inspired by the sort of people who might have lived. Ordinary women and men, struggling to live, love and survive against a backdrop of religious war and displacement.”

Kate Mosse is a number one international bestselling novelist, playwright and non-fiction writer. The author of eight novels and short story collections – including the multimillionselling Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel) and Gothic fiction The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist’s Daughter, which she is adapting for the stage – her books have been translated into thirty-eight languages and published in more than forty countries. She is the Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a regular interviewer for theatre & fiction events. Kate divides her time between Chichester in West Sussex and Carcassonne in south-west France. http://www.katemosse.co.uk | Twitter: @katemosse | Instagram: @katemossewriter | Facebook: KateMosseAuthor

My thoughts: it took me a moment to remember the events of the previous books as I read them what feels like ages ago. But once I’d caught myself up we were away and soon I was deep in religiously fractured France and the events surrounding the royal wedding and a violent reprisal against the Huguenots gathered for it.

Minou and Piet will suffer loss and heartbreak, have to flee France for Amsterdam and still evade the evil cardinal Vidal, who has his own plots and schemes in process.

I’d forgotten how good this series is, how thrilling the period is and how well Mosse brings it to life. You almost feel like you’re there with Minou as she tries to keep the family together through yet more difficult times.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.