Kate Mosse's Autumn: A Sussex Love Song — SkimNews
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- Kate Mosse's new book Autumn is the third in a series pairing authors with their home landscapes, following Michael Morpurgo on Devon and Val McDermid on Scotland; Bernardine Evaristo is set to cover summer next.
- Mosse has spent nearly all of her 65 years in Sussex — growing up in the village of Fishbourne, meeting her husband while revising for A-levels in Chichester — and now shares a home there with her 90-something mother-in-law 'Granny Rosie.'
- The book traces Sussex's literary heritage, noting that Rudyard Kipling wrote Kim and Just So Stories while living in the county (settling in Burwash in the late 1800s), William Blake drafted Jerusalem in Felpham before a sedition trial in Chichester, and John Keats drew on Chichester's architecture for The Eve of St Agnes.
- Mosse braids personal memories through Sussex's landscape of bronze-age camps, iron-age forts, wetlands, the downs, and Devil's Dyke, opening autumn on her first day at school — 'Four, rising five' — 60 years ago on 1 September.
- The book runs from Halloween through Lewes Bonfire Night to the November harvest festival, with Mosse framing autumn itself as 'a kind of harvest' — a thank-you for 'the gift of home.'
Why it matters: By weaving bronze-age camps, Kipling's Burwash, and her own first day at school into one narrative, Mosse turns 'Autumn' into the most intimate entry in a writers-on-their-homeland series that already includes Morpurgo on Devon and McDermid on Scotland — one the reviewer finds wins out over any guide-book impulse.
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