Kate Mosse’s new book, Autumn, is both a celebration of the season and a deeply personal love letter to Sussex. Written between the first day of September and the last day of November, it brings together landscape, memory, family, creativity and the quiet pleasure of noticing the world immediately around us.
We spoke to the bestselling novelist, who lives in Sussex, about autumn as a season of new beginnings, the meaning of home and belonging, the importance of slowing down, and why she had to leave Sussex before she could truly write about it.
At the beginning of Autumn, you say it is a book that chose you. Why did it feel like a book that had been waiting for you?
It’s part of a series. Michael Morpurgo has written a book called Spring, Bernardine Evaristo is writing Summer and Val McDermid has done Winter, and I was approached to write Autumn. The funny thing is, we all thought we had been given the best season, whereas actually they had chosen us superbly. Michael said to me, “Kate, I’m so sorry I got spring.” And I said, “Michael, autumn is my favourite season. I didn’t want spring.”
Why? Because even though I’ve been out of full-time education for 45 years, I still have that sense of new beginnings in autumn. When September comes, for me it is still that spike of excitement: you can be whoever you want to be. This is the moment at which you can step up and be a different sort of person or achieve different sorts of things. I never feel that on New Year’s Day, but I do at the beginning of September. It’s that back-to-school feeling, which I shared with my own children and now share with my grandchildren. It’s the season of new beginnings.
But full disclosure, it is also the season of my birthday. It’s on the 20th of October and, in Chichester, where I am born and bred, the Sloe Fair, comes to the town on that one day. When I was little, and because I had wonderful parents, I believed the fair had been laid on for me. Of course, it actually dates back to the 12th century and has nothing to do with me at all.
You describe the book as a love letter to Sussex as well as to autumn
Yes, I live in an extraordinary part of the world and I loved writing this book. It was a mixture of looking outside my window and recording what I could see, which created a kind of patchwork of that particular autumn, but also of all my autumns in Sussex.
There are the changing colours, the copper, russet, green and burgundy, and the way the trees lose their leaves in sequence. There is the extraordinary, varied weather: incredible heat, but also the cold and wet of autumn and winter slowly seeping in. I did bits of research, but actually it is a book about memory. That gave me the chance not only to revisit all the places I love and have walked throughout my life, with a notebook in hand, but also to reflect on what it means to come from somewhere and what home means. And it allowed me to honour the artists, writers, poets and painters who have put our wonderful green patch of country on the page or canvas.
It felt like an obvious book for me to write, yet I had never written it. In the end, it became the most peaceful book I’ve ever written.
Near the end, you write about being “held by Sussex”. How important is it to feel that we belong somewhere?
I think it is essential. Many people have an enormously strong sense of place, of coming from somewhere and belonging to somewhere. In my last series of historical novels, the Joubert Family Chronicles, I wrote about refugees, the Huguenot refugees who found themselves on the far side of the world in South Africa, still mourning a place in France that they had never even seen. They carried it with them.
At the heart of great epic stories is the journey and then the return: the idea of coming back to somewhere that knows you, where you will always be welcomed back. Many people in our very challenging world do not have that. They are displaced by war, work, circumstance, climate or poverty. But I think that, for all human beings, the sense of being part of something bigger, that you come from somewhere, is incredibly important.
There were times in my younger life when I wished I didn’t feel it so strongly. I would have loved to be able to up sticks and live somewhere else. Maybe France, America or Norway. But every single time I turn off the A3, take the back roads and pass the sign that says “Welcome to West Sussex”, I think, “Oh, this is where I belong.” And, of course, as you get older, that becomes a more and more wonderful thing rather than a confining thing. It is about being anchored to something.
Of course, I say all of this knowing that many people do not have that connection, and that there are other ways to find your anchor and make your choices. This is a very personal book, and I am talking about what I feel.
The book also feels like an invitation to slow down and appreciate what is already around us
That’s precisely it. It is a sense of going back to basics, appreciating what we have and understanding that we are lucky to have it. So many people don’t have the ability that most of us do to step safely outside the front door, look around and think, “Isn’t the world great?”
I am a positive person. I’ve always been a glass-overflowing rather than a glass-half-empty person. But the busier and more frantic our lives are, and the more intrusion there is from social media and phones, the less peace there is in the world. You actively have to seek it out. You have to make a decision. The book is saying: slow down if you can, and understand that ten minutes of peace and solitude is better than no minutes of peace and solitude. Take pleasure in all the small things, because they lift your soul and your spirits.
I write very early in the morning and there was an epic thunderstorm at about four o’clock in Chichester this morning. There was torrential rain, which was wonderful to hear, and incredible rolling thunder. Now the sun is out and the trees around me look like gold. These are tiny things. We need to find that sense of both awe and self and try to get to a place where our resting state is content.
Has caring also influenced that reflective quality in the book?
I have been a carer for 15 years, so I live in a world where people are thinking about what will happen at the end. I nursed my parents to that point and my mother-in-law is 96, so I am perhaps closer than some people to thinking about those things. I find it very reassuring that everything I can see outside the window will go on when I am not here. I don’t find that a morbid, sad or frightening thought. That is the point about the land holding the human story: it continues, and our path through it is very brief and transient.
What, if anything, does France give you that Sussex can’t?
Sussex is home. France is my adopted home. What France gave me was the ability to be a writer because, here in Sussex, I am always somebody’s daughter, pupil, sister, friend, mum or supporter. I had to go away from home in order to be free to start writing about it. Carcassonne gave me the gift of being an outsider. Because of that, I discovered a different kind of imagination and storytelling. Sussex and France are different parts of myself and of my creative self, and they have become much closer together as I have got older. But I never don’t feel wonderful coming home.
Autumn
Part of the Hodder Press Seasons series, Autumn follows Michael Morpurgo’s Spring and Val McDermid’s Winter, with Bernardine Evaristo’s Summer to follow. It is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 10 September 2026 and you can join Kate Mosse for the launch in September in Chichester.
To read our review of Autumn:
