Kate Mosse: ‘There was this idea that women weren’t quite experts’

‘This book more than any book I’ve ever read, tells you what racism actually is. It’s the idea that a child cannot make sense of the world. She knows it’s unfair and her life is brutal and difficult. She looks at this pretty white girl with blond hair and blue eyes. And rather than think, well, it’s because there is structural racism, and the world is not set up fairly… She simply thinks in the purity and innocence of a child mind, if I looked like that my life would be fine. And actually, that’s it.’

Creature is not this evil monster to begin with. The creature just wants to belong, wants to be like everybody else and wants to be loved and love in return. And it’s only when Creature realises that everybody thinks he’s monstrous, that the thing that keeps the world sane and wonderful, that’s to say love, will be denied to him that he goes wild and runs amok. And that is what is so significant that this is a book about what happens if you withhold love.’

‘I think [Rich] has a beauty of language, that in three or four words, can pick you up from where you are, and set you down in a completely different time and place, you know, the texture, the grit, the heat, the cold, the environment that she wants you to be in.’

‘It’s the perfect crime novel. For people who have not read any Miss Marple. You’ve got to read this one first. Then you read all the others because she’s a genius, but just start with this one. It’s got everything that you need. It’s got Jeopardy. It’s got classical illusion, it’s got memory. It’s got a sense of a lost England, and a brilliant, brilliant and awful crime at the heart of it.’

‘What Morgan does, which I think is really exceptional in a memoir like this, is that she puts everything down on the page. So she doesn’t glamorise herself. And she doesn’t glamorise the situation, every mistake that she thinks she made, in how she dealt with everything she puts on the page, she has a very harsh critic of herself. But what she does for all of us is to say, this is what real life is like.’