This is Part Two of a Kate Mosse interview special each half conducted two years apart (in Part One she discussed in detail with Claudia Cragg her first novel 'Labyrinth' in detail. In this interview, we hear Kate discussing her next novel with Claudia and, as she points out, several of the major characters in the first work make cameo appearances in the second. 

'Sepulchre' is set in 1891 and Léonie Vernier is a young girl living in Paris until an invitation from her uncle's widow Isolde prompts a journey to the Carcassonne region with her brother, Anatole. Unknown to her, her brother and Isolde have been carrying on an affair, and he is being pursued by Isolde's jealous former lover, Victor Constant. For a while, they live an idyllic lifestyle in the country. However, Constant discovers where they are staying and sets out to exact his revenge.

In the present day, an American, Meredith Martin, is in France to research the life of Claude Debussy for a biography she is writing. She is also trying to find out more about her biological mother. During the visit, she uncovers information that links her lineage to that of Léonie Vernier and discovers the truth about the events in Carcassonne during that period in history.

Most of the action takes place in the Domaine de la Cade, a stately home in Rennes-les-Bains, which in 1891 is owned by Léonie's deceased uncle Jules and his wife Isolde of whom Anatole later marries. The house in Meredith's timeline has been repurposed as an upmarket hotel. There are also parts of the book that are situated in Paris at the same time as well as neighbouring towns and villages in the Carcassonne and the City of Carcassonne.

The story features heavy reference to the occult and tarot readings, and the stories of Léonie and Meredith are brought together by a series of visions that are related to the tarot and a small church, known as a Sepulchre in the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade.

There are current talks with producers of making both Labyrinth and Sepulchre into films.

As of of September 2010, Kate Mosse is taking part on BBC1 in 'My Story, as a judge on a panel with other writers, Fergal Keane, Jenny Colgan, who have chosen 15 finalists from 7,500 entries. The winners will have their stories published.

This interview was conducted a few years ago with Kate Mosse not long after her first bestselling novel, Labyrinth was published. It became a New York Times bestseller and a popular and critical success on an international scale. It won the 'Best Read' category at the British Book Awards 2006, was #1 in UK paperback for six months — selling nearly two million copies — and was the biggest selling title of 2006. In 2007, it was named as one of the Top 25 books of the past 25 years by the bookselling chain Waterstone’s. It also hit the bestseller charts in various countries throughout the world, including the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Norway, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Translation rights to Labyrinth have been sold in thirty-eight languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew.

In this feature, Kate discusses how she became an author (having started her literary career on the other side, as a commissioning editor in a major UK publishing house), the establishment of the Orange Prize for Fiction and how and why she became a writer. She descries the dominance of old, white, males as author in the English canon. She discusses why she took lessons in fencing that she took to understand a 16 year old medieval Cathar girl, the female hero (sic.) of 'Labyrinth'. To those who would consider 'Labyrinth' a clone in Brown 'Grail' novel style, Mosse has a counter: the subject is as old as time and found in almost every post-Christian culture.

Be sure, also, to listen to Part II (sequetial to this in the podcast series) in which Kate discusses her second best selling novel, Sepulchre.

Tom Hayden, who columnist Dan Walters of The Sacramento Bee once called "the conscience of the Senate", is an American social and political activist, politician, and regular contributor to 'The Nation' who is perhaps most famous for his involvement in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s as well as in animal rights (The Hayden Act).

Hayden was elected to the California State Legislature in 1982, where he served for ten years in the Assembly before being elected to the State Senate in 1992, where he served eight years till the year 2000. He continues to serve as a member of the advisory board for the Progressive Democrats of America, an influential "grass roots" organization created to expand progressive political cooperation within the Democratic Party. With Medea Benjamin, he is also a co-founder of 'Code Pink'. 

Ahead of next week's primary elections in CA and with Colorado's own primaries now behind us, 'It's the Economy's' Claudia Cragg spoke with Hayden about the economy, the potential financial collapse of some states including California, Obama's stimulus package, small business and, importantly, why politicians on both sides continue stubbornly to refuse to debate the real 'elephant in the room', as Hayden puts it, the cost to the US and its people of its ongoing wars.

Hayden starts here by discussing that theme and the Pentagon's 'Long War' doctrine, "a 50 - 80 year war against Islamic terrorism" which he says comes at a huge cost to the economy and to the nation as a whole.

UPDATE - The following is reproduced here with the kind permission of Tom Hayden:

Published on Friday, November 12, 2010 by The Nation
When Will Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan Ever End?
by Tom Hayden

Persistent waffling on dates for American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan has eroded any remaining patience with the Obama White House among peace activists and voters, a majority of whom favors a timeline for US troop withdrawals.

Nancy Youssef of McClatchy reports that the White House has decided to de-emphasize its pledge to begin withdrawing US forces by next July, and adopt a new goal of withdrawing by 2014. The New York Times on Nov. 11 described the new policy as "effectively a victory for the military." Seeming to miss the point entirely, the White House immediately declared it was "crystal clear" that there will be no change to the July 2011 date for beginning the drawdown.

The credibility problem is that the White House has never defined the scale of its initial drawdown, lending credence to reports that the elusive pursuit of "success" will take years. Filling in the blanks is the only way the White House can repair this image crisis. For example, Obama could promise to withdraw 50,000 US troops between 2011-2012, a number that would dispel the aura of tokenism and weakness which now surrounds US policy. The moderate Afghanistan Study Group, whose members have ties to the White House, has proposed withdrawing 32,000 by next October and another 38,000 by the following July. The AFG has stated, "The U.S. cannot afford to continue waffling on its commitments, lest it lose what little credibility it has with Afghan people.  Reneging on the July deadline will also likely have adverse political effects given that war is already very unpopular .

The president is expected to clarify his goals at a NATO conference this week. America's leading military partner, the United Kingdom , with some 9,500 troops, has already floated 2014 as the deadline for its troop departure. Canada , France , Italy , Poland , Sweden and the Netherlands , whose combat troops total a combined 14,850, are all in the process of withdrawing by 2014 at the latest.

The projected costs of another three years are staggering and rarely reported. Assuming the current pattern of American casualties and costs through 2012, followed by a fifty percent reduction in those figures in 2013-14, Pentagon data reveals the following:

Oct. 2001-Nov. 2010: Americans killed, 1378; Americans wounded, 9,256; direct taxpayer costs, $364 billion.

2011 projection: 450 more Americans killed, bringing the cumulative total to 1,850; 5,000 more Americans wounded, bringing the cumulative total to 14,800; another $113 billion in direct taxpayer costs, bringing the cumulative total to $503 billion.

2012 projection: at present rates, the cumulative death toll will become 2,300, the cumulative wounded number will become 15,300; and the cumulative budget cost will become $616 billion.

2013-14 projections [assuming a fifty percent reduction]: another 450 killed over two years, bringing the total to 2,750; another 5,000 wounded over two years, bringing the total to 20,300; another $113 billion over two years, bringing the total to $728 billion.

In plainer terms, the projected American casualties and costs in Afghanistan alone will double in the next three years from present levels.

According to the current Foreign Affairs , the war in Afghanistan is now more than twice expensive as Iraq [Altman-Haass, "American Profligacy and American Power", Nov.-Dec. 2010, p. 31].

Those numbers do not include Pakistan, Yemen or tens of billions in the growing US intelligence budget. Nor do the tax dollar figures include rising indirect costs such as veterans' health care. Nor are the casualties civilians known or estimated.

Perhaps the greatest policy question is what the American troops are fighting for. According to the CIA, there are no more than 100 Al Qaeda militants lingering in Afghanistan. Their sanctuaries have moved to Pakistan and CIA officials have recently said, "the Yemeni cell posed an even more dangerous threat to the United States than the Qaeda headquarters in Pakistan." [NYT , Oct. 17, 2010]

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, American troops are fighting and dying to prop up an Afghanistan regime that is riddled with corruption, lacks a sufficient army to defend itself, and maintains power by fraudulent elections.

The cruel pathos of the American situation is summed up in two options sketched by Gideon Rose, the new editor of Foreign Affairs, the organ of the Council on Foreign Affairs:

First, "at best, Afghanistan could become another Iraq, with strong late innings gaining the United States the opportunity to draw down its forces gradually" or, second, "it could be a replay of Vietnam, with the White House deciding to pull the plug on a thankless struggle in a strategically marginal country." A third option is ignored, that of another massive terrorist attack on the US provoked by the drone attacks and night raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [NYT , Nov. 5, 2010]

There is another cost, too. The constant drain in blood and taxes for the long wars may soon become a terminal drain on any hopes for the Obama presidency.

Tom Hayden is a former state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice and environmental movements. He currently teaches at PitzerCollege in Los Angeles. His books include The Port Huron Statement [new edition], Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader .

20 April 2011 UPDATE: 

Tragically, leading British photojournalist Tim Hetherington (see story below) has been killed while covering the fighting in the Libyan city of Misurata, the UK Foreign Office has confirmed. His vitally important work will be greatly missed. 

Sebastian Junger is an author and war correspondent whose 1995 novel 'Perfect Storm' was made into a movie and prompted comparisons of his work to that of Ernest Hemingway.

Having been hailed as a great new literary voice, Junger then seemed to transition to war correspondent and that may be, as he discusses here, after an encounter between his achilles tendon and a chainsaw up a tree. He was working in earlier days as a high flying arborist.

Shortly after that incident when he came face to face with the ghastly grizzle of his exposed foot, Junger found himself in the middle of the Balkans covering the atrocities. Some say that Junger has since further metamorphosized both his work and persona, appearing recently as part of a national book tour on various 'Sunday talkies' with US Army Generals and war pundits. Here though Junger explains to Claudia Cragg what he considers to be the motivations for his work.

Junger's latest book 'War' is based on visits he made to eastern Afghanistan from June 2007 to June 2008. These despatches on assignment for Vanity Fair have also resulted in the film Restrepo (2010). Made with Brit. Tim Hetherington this documentary was produced from the time the two worked together in Afghanistan spending a year with one platoon in the Korangal Valley, billed as the deadliest valley in Afghanistan. The title of the film refers to the outpost where Junger was 'embedded', which was named after a combat medic, Pfc. Juan Restrepo, killed in action. To Junger, "It’s a completely apolitical film. We wanted to give viewers the experience of being in combat with soldiers, and so our cameras never leave their side. There are no interviews with generals; there is no moral or political analysis. It is a purely experiential film. 

Restrepo, which premiered on the opening night of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, won the grand jury prize for a domestic documentary.Junger self-financed the film, but then toward the end got National Geographic to fund the rest of the film.

(You may have noticed that recent interviews have been with predominantly male subjects. This reflects, not the interviewer's preference, but sadly the dirth of female subjects. Should you wish to hear an interview with a specific author or personality, please do email your suggestions to journalist@bigfoot.com).

In this interview, Dr. Matthew B. Crawford talks to Claudia Cragg about 'Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. This iconic book - bound to be as powerful as 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' was in its day - Crawford also explores why some jobs offer fulfilment while others leave us frustrated.

It answers the question as to why we so often think of our working selves as separate from our 'true' selves?

Over the course of the twentieth century, Dr. Crawford argues that we have separated mental work from manual labour, replacing the workshop with either the office cubicle or the factory line.

In this inspiring and persuasive book, he explores the dangers of this false distinction and presents instead the case for working with your hands. It will also force many a parent to question why today they are only pushing their kids hard towards academic (grade-based rote-learning, mulitple choice) success, turning them only into knowledge workers many of whom will be doomed to remain for an eternity on the very bottom of the pile.

The publishers believe that Dr Crawford "delivers a radical, timely and extremely enjoyable re-evaluation of our attitudes to work" and no doubt a great many listeners to this interview might well agree. 

Matthew B. Crawford majored in physics as an undergraduate, then turned to political philosophy (Ph.D. Chicago). His writings for The New Atlantis, A Journal of Technology and Society, bring the two concerns together, and consider how developments in the sciences influence our view of the human person. Currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, he also runs a small business in Richmond.

note: In the US, the book is known as 'Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work'.

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In this interview, Dave Isay the founder of StoryCorps, talks to Claudia Cragg about 'Mom', the latest book to be published out of the project. This is a celebration in print of American mothers from all walks of life and experiences. Selected from StoryCorps’ extensive archive of interviews, Mom is, StoryCorps says, a presentation of collective wisdom that has been passed from mothers to their children in StoryCorps’ recording booths across the United States.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission, they say, is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, over 50,000 everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and the project's Listen Pages.

Isay is also the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including five Peabody Awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He is the author/editor of numerous books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, as well as the StoryCorps books. 

You can listen to StoryCorps stories and learn more about the oral history project here.

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people—farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs—who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history.

Country Driving begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center.

Peter Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls "one of the Western world's most thoughtful writers on modern China," deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.

Hessler, a native of Columbia, Missouri, studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford before going to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His two-year experience of teaching English in Fuling, a town on the Yangtze, inspired River Town, his critically acclaimed first book. After finishing his Peace Corps stint, Hessler wrote freelance pieces for Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times before returning to China in 1999 as a Beijing-based freelance writer. There he wrote for newspapers like the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the South China Morning Post before moving on to magazine work for National Geographic and the New Yorker.

This interview is with Lionel Shriver who lives in London and in the US. Few writers, fearing audience backlash, are as prepared to nail their political colors to the mast as she is.

The author of 10 novels, she stunned critics and readers alike with We Need To Talk About Kevin written in the voice of the mother of a Columbine type killer.

Now in her latest So Much For That' she gives readers a deeply honest look at the human cost of the American health care and insurance systems. Here she explains to  Claudia Cragg just why the topic was/is so important to her and no doubt now rejoices in the passage of President Obama's Healthcare bill.

The narrative is a searing, deeply humane novel about a crumbling marriage resurrected in the face of illness, and a family’s struggle to come to terms with disease, dying, and the obscene cost of medical care in modern America.

This interview is with the economist Joseph Stiglitz who has played a number of policy roles and discussion revolves mostly around his latest book, Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy.

Stiglitz has advised American President Barack Obama, but has also been sharply critical of the Obama Administration's financial-industry rescue plan. Stiglitz said that whoever designed the Obama administration's bank rescue plan is “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.

Professor Stiglitz (he teaches at Columbia) served in the Clinton Administration as the chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (1995 – 1997). At the World Bank, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist (1997 – 2000), in the time when unprecedented protest against international economic organizations started, most prominently with the Seattle WTO meeting of 1999. He was fired by the World Bank for expressing dissent with its policies. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He is a member of Collegium International, an organization of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just and an economically sustainable world.

He was born in Gary, Indiana, to Jewish parents, Charlotte and Nathaniel Stiglitz. From 1960 to 1963, he studied at Amherst College, where he was a highly active member of the debate team and President of the Student Government. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his fourth year as an undergraduate, where he later pursued graduate work. His undergraduate degree was awarded from Amherst College. From 1965 to 1966, he moved to the University of Chicago to do research under Hirofumi Uzawa who had received an NSF grant. He studied for his PhD from MIT from 1966 to 1967, during which time he also held an MIT assistant professorship. The particular style of MIT economics suited him well - simple and concrete models, directed at answering important and relevant questions. From 1969 to 1970, he was a Fulbright research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

In subsequent years, he held professorships at Yale University, Stanford University, Duke University, Oxford University and Princeton University. Stiglitz is now a Professor at Columbia University, with appointments at the Business School, the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and is editor of The Economists' Voice journal with J. Bradford DeLong and Aaron Edlin. He also gives classes for a double-degree program between Sciences Po Paris and Ecole Polytechnique in 'Economics and Public Policy'. As of 2005 he chairs The Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. Stiglitz is generally considered to be a New-Keynesian economist.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Audrey Niffenegger about her new novel  Her Fearful Symmetry, a haunting tale about the complications of love, identity, and sibling rivalry. The narrative opens with the death of Elspeth Noblin, who bequeaths her London flat and its contents to the twin daughters of her estranged twin sister back in Chicago. These 20-year-old dilettantes, Julie and Valentina, move to London, eager to try on a new experience like one of their obsessively matched outfits. Historic Highgate Cemetery, which borders Elspeth's home, serves as an inspired setting as the twins become entwined in the lives of their neighbors: Elspeth's former lover, Robert; Martin, an agoraphobic crossword-puzzle creator; and the ethereal Elspeth herself, struggling to adjust to the afterlife.

It was 13 years ago that Niffenegger first developed the idea for the book which was to become The Time Traveller's Wife. She originally imagined making it as a graphic novel, but eventually realized that it would be very difficult to represent sudden time shifts with still images. She began to work on the project as a novel and it was then published in 2003. It was an international best-seller and has recently been adapted for cinema screens. Interesting to note, however, Niffenegger has not yet seen the film and does not plan to do so.

Niffenegger is also a visual artist and lives in Chicago where she is a full -ime professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. She teaches writing, letterpress printing, and fine edition book production. She also pens a cartoon for The Guardian newspaper to be published some time next year. Her amusements include collecting taxidermy and reading comic books. Miss Niffenegger is recorded as saying that she “spent her youth hiding in her bedroom and painting her fingernails black while listening to Patti Smith and Gang of Four, but she is feeling better now, thanks”.