Kate Mosse, the much-loved author and co-founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is earning rave reviews for her latest book, The Burning Chambers, which landed on shelves recently.

Many critics are drawing parallels between The Burning Chambers and Kate’s 2005 bestseller Labyrinth – and, rather excitingly for those of us who adored this earlier novel, Kate (below) does the same herself. “If you loved Labyrinth, I hope – fingers crossed – you’ll love this,” she explains.

“They are totally different stories, totally different periods of history, but the spirit of the two books is the same. And I feel about this book like I felt about Labyrinth. Not that I don’t love all my other books!” she quickly adds, laughing. “But this feels like… yes.”

As a writer of historical fiction, Kate’s keen to point out she is not a historian. “I’m a reader of history – and I do think that with everything we see in the modern day, there’s a lesson from history that we could have learned.

“Sometimes it’s very complicated to analyse what one is feeling, or what one can actually do about the contemporary world, and the way things seem to be changing very fast, in ways that many people are very unhappy with – but you can deal with a lot of the same emotions and, indeed, the same issues – by looking to the past. And that’s what I try to do: I write imagined characters, and an imaginary story, against a backdrop of real history.”

In the case of The Burning Chambers and the two books due to follow it, the backdrop spans 300 years, following the Huguenot diaspora around the world. “It’s a refugee story, really,” she explains, “about people who – for no fault of their own – are forced apart from their neighbours, told that people who they had loved all their lives are now the enemy – and having to leave the places where their families have lived for generations, and find a home in another part of the world, where often people don’t want you. And that’s the Huguenot story.”

When Kate started researching The Burning Chambers several years ago, she didn’t imagine that there’d be such strong echoes in the modern world. “It’s utterly set in the 15th and 16th century – historical fiction must only be about the time in which it’s written – but the echoes, obviously, go out.”