Labyrinth

Paperback

Rating

(1594 ratings; 3.3)

Series

Languedoc Trilogy (1)

Genres

Description

July 2005. In the Pyrenees mountains near Carcassonne, Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig, stumbles into a cave and makes a startling discovery-two crumbling skeletons, strange writings on the walls, and the pattern of a labyrinth. Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade that will rip apart southern France, a young woman named Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father. The book, he says, contains the secret of the true Grail, and the ring, inscribed with a labyrinth, will identify a guardian of the Grail. Now, as crusading armies gather outside the city walls of Carcassonne, it will take a tremendous sacrifice to keep the secret of the labyrinth safe.

Media reviews

Le Point

(.. .) Kate Mosse réussit son coup. A défaut de faire date - elle n'est quand même pas la première à mettre en scène des femmes ! -, son talent de conteuse fait mouche. Et peut séduire cet été.

— 1 more

Daily Mail

Le roman 'Labyrinthe' contient tous les ingrédients d'un best-seller estival.

User reviews

LibraryThing member wandering_star

This book was described to me as 'intelligent chick lit'. What a disappointment. Just because a book is informed by historical research doesn't make it intelligent. The writing is cliched (candles 'flicker', darkness is 'velvet', men are strong 'as an ox') - as are the characters (the sexually

predatory villainess whom men are 'powerless to resist', the coldhearted, zealous villain). There was no attempt to get the historical characters to think or behave as they might have done in the period - and the parallel stories were incredibly unsubtle (premonitions, strange senses of familiarity, objects which give the modern-day character strange flashes of memory....). Unlike the review below this, I didn't have a problem with the story itself - but it was so incredibly badly written I couldn't really believe it had been published!

The only reason I got through this book is that I was reading it on a long train journey.

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LibraryThing member elliepotten

I had seen this book in the shops for months before I stumbled across it a discount bookshop and thought 'what the hell?' I started reading it that night and by the same time two days later I had read myself to exhaustion and had finished it.
The book centres around a mysterious Grail story,

combining mythology and history, past and present, magic and reality, in a fantastically constructed plot which doesn't disappoint in terms of excitement, romance, description or its ability to shock and to move.

One half of the story takes place in modern-day France, in the Languedoc, where a girl called Alice stumbles across a mysterious cave with unexplained skeletons and a frightening aura. The other half moves back to medieval France, when religious turmoil and warring are threatening to devastate the land where Alais lives with her family and husband. As the story progresses the secret of the Grail and its relevance to the two women and the wider world becomes apparent.
By the end of the novel I had shaken with anticipation and suspense, laughed, sighed, and cried hysterically. It inspired me to find out more about the history of the Languedoc. There is also a new edition of the novel with photographic illustrations of locations and artefacts relevant to the narrative - which I bought too...

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LibraryThing member bookwitch

Rave reviews from The Guardian, Val McDermid, Nikki Gerard, The Times and Sunday Times, Myslexia Magazine, The Daily Mail, The Independent and others, not to mention Richard and Judy, coupled with the fact that Kate Mosse invented the Orange Prize for Fiction, must have prompted thousands to buy

this book. And all the ingredients to make this a magical and memorable read are between its covers: an archaeological dig, female protagonists, mystery, adventure, historical fiction set in medieval France with the Cathars, a supernatural element, and as if all this weren’t enough a quest for the true grail.

I should have loved it. Yet I have to be honest – the best part about this book is the cover itself. The story opens with Alice, an amateur archaeologist, following some inexplicable urge to do some illicit digging away from the others. She pulls a buckle from the earth beneath a large boulder and Lo! The boulder rolls away to reveal the mouth of a cave. At this point I wondered whether I’d mistaken Kate Mosse for Enid Blyton, although Kate Mosse doesn’t write so well.

From the clichéd beginning things only get worse. I can read a book simply for its beautiful prose, but Labyrinth is at best poorly written, loaded with cliché and reminiscent of the worst of chick-lit. The characters are poorly drawn, and the verb ‘to be’ worked to death. I cared so little for the characters and the plot that the book fell from my hand three times before I reached page 154 and decided that life was too short to struggle on.

Forget the grail: the only mystery I’m interested in solving is how this book was accepted for publication and whether any of the reviewers actually opened it.

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LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C

This reads far too much like a The Da Vinci Code wannabe, dealing with a Grail Quest set in France and involving a Secret Society and a gal threatened by a thuggish cult. This gets one star more than Dan Brown's book because it's better written and more historically accurate--or given I'm no

expert, at least more historically plausible.

It's still a mediocre book at best, way overlong and overwritten. I haven't seen so much simile abuse since Raymond Chandler. Here's a typical sentence from early on: Then a drop of blood splashes onto her bare leg, exploding like a firework in the sky on Guy Fawkes night. Uhm... doesn't work for me, and yes, I know what Guy Fawkes night is.

It's two books really, with linked female protagonists. The present tense prologue is set at an archeological dig in Southern France, where Alice Tanner, breaking every rule of good sense and archeological guidelines, stumbles upon an 800-year-old find in a cave. She picks up a ring near two skeletons inscribed with a labyrinth design. This particular time-frame runs along the usual popular thriller lines. Eye-rollingly cliched, and it's not a good thing when pages in, I want to slap our heroine silly.

We then move to 1209 and seventeen-year-old Alais, who lives in Southern France in the land of the Languedoc. This strand is historical fiction, dealing with the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade. The Cathars were a sect the Roman Catholic Church considered heretical and had spread throughout Southern France until the Pope called a crusade to eradicate them. Soon that same labyrinth design will figure in the medieval timeline. I wish Mosse had kept strictly to the medieval part of the tale, since I did find the Cathars inherently interesting, and the author certainly does give us a wealth of historical detail. The problem is that really good historical fiction gives me a real sense of an alien mindset, of just how different people thought then, while at the same time fleshing out characters in a way that's complex and human. Mosse doesn't do this and none of the characters ever seemed rounded and real to me. I did find Alais less annoying than her present day counterpart. It helps that when we meet her she's almost half the age of Alice at a time where women's roles were much more proscribed, so I was willing to give her more slack, but she increasingly struck me as "Mary Sue." Also, a favorite work of fiction, Robert Shea's All Things Are Lights deals with the Albigensian Crusade, and I felt this book suffered in comparison.

The whole reincarnation schtick also didn't work for me. I have a friend who loves such themes in fiction, but it has to be done really, really well for me not to find it eye-rolling. This wasn't done really, really well.

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LibraryThing member ariane5

I had high hopes for this book, having seen it on Richard and Judy's book Club list and having loved many other books they suggested. I kept seeing it in shops, decided it was "a sign" and took the plunge. Oh, how I wish I hadn't.

It is by far the most boring book I've ever had the misfortune to

read. I love reading at bedtime and always look forward to that quiet, alone time but when I was reading this book I HATED going to bed! I picked the book up every night and literally said "Oh no, must I?" to myself. Of course I could have just stopped and chosen another book, but the most annoying thing about this load of old pooh is that it made me want to see what would happen, if ANYTHING would happen, at the end!

The female protagonist has absolutely no substance to her whatsoever and I didn't care a jot about a single character in the book.

Someone recently gave me Kate Mosse's latest tome, Sepulchre, to read and I can't even bear to look at it, much less start reading it.

Read "The Savage Garden", "The Time traveller's Wife" or anything short-listed for the Orange Prize For Fiction instead of this criminal verbiage.

I'm so glad that Librarything allows one to award no stars as I would hate to give this book even one.

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LibraryThing member TheoClarke

Hugely disappointing audiobook marred by a plethora of diverse irritations. The narrator's absurdly inappropriate intonation is exacerbated by jarring disjunctions of Occitan and English akin to the use of German-accented English by Nazi characters in war movies. As text the clumsy literary style

and the repetition of hackneyed plot devices could be skipped to hasten the story along but this audiobook repeatedly induced sleep in the first few hours (literally; I fell asleep again and again while listening) until the pace picked up and the paucity of ideas became apparent. I am enthusiastic about the archaeology, Cathars, and grail quests; I wanted to love this novel and may still sample it in print.

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LibraryThing member ed.pendragon

I read this before it was acclaimed The Viewers' Choice in a TV Book Club shortlist at the 2006 British Book Awards but, frankly, remained unimpressed. I had high expectations for an out-of-the-ordinary modern take on the holy grail written by a successful reviewer and sponsor of new writing, but

was deeply disappointed at the result.

Kate Mosse has mixed up a cocktail of familiar elements (Cathar heretics, reincarnation, grail, medieval archaeology) and somehow turned it into a romance-cum-fantasy-cum-thriller of the cheapest kind. I admore her research into life in the Middle Ages, her knowledge of the French Midi (she lives in Carcassonne, 'restored' to a Victorian vision of the High Middle Ages), her attempt to make the grail a little different from the familiar holy bloodline thesis. However, her use of Hollywood-influenced magic and crude Disneyesque villains and villainesses, combined with a holier-than-thou heroine, ultimately left this reader cold. Still, I couldn't argue with 70,000 presumably satisfied readers in 2006, and probably can't now.

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LibraryThing member Meredy

I've committed a lot of book abandonment so far this year--sixteen titles through October--and here, alas, is yet one more: Labyrinth is going down at just past the midpoint.

When I take a day or two off from my main read, my bedtime read, and don't miss it, it's doomed.

In the present case, it's

definitely a matter of the author's handling of her material. She must have got the idea somewhere that it's a good plan to dispense with exposition and get right to the action, plunging the reader headlong into the story instead of weighing it down with description and explanation.

This is all very well in a certain kind of novel, but here is one with two main characters, very many secondary and minor characters (several of whose names are similar), two timelines separated by eight centuries, unfamiliar settings, historical situations, and fantasy elements that only the author can tell us about. This is too much to get by inference or retain in memory and then keep track of without enough reminders at each shift of time and place. The author seems to think that keeping a reader disoriented (not disorientated, Kate) arouses curiosity and suspense, whereas I simply find it annoying. In medias res is one thing; a constant state of "What's going on? And who are these people? Are they new, or am I supposed to know them already?" is wearing.

As it happens, I've done a fair bit of research into that period and place myself, having read some eight or ten books on medieval France and the Cathars in particular, so I'm receptive to its power to fascinate. And I do appreciate the way the author evokes the sensory experience of the setting. But what's bogging me down is trying to hold in mind a large assortment of characters without enough clues to which ones are going to be important or enough reminders as to their interrelationships.

This becomes even harder when the author's own slips occur. For instance, on page 148 Amiel is a blacksmith in a stable. On page 180 another Amiel, Amiel de Coursan, performs a rescue. On page 247 people are praising the bravery of Amaury, not Amiel, de Coursan. An Amazon search tells me that there are two other Amaurys mentioned in the book.

In fact, there are altogether too many names beginning with A throughout, including the two principals, whose similarity of names is obviously deliberate and who ought to have been enough for the A's.

I'm also bothered by a certain self-conscious preciousness of style, having already been put off by the presence of four exclamation points in two pages of acknowledgments up front (two in the same paragraph). At numerous points I get the feeling that the author is preening a little, showing off technique and research instead of keeping her craftsmanship smooth and invisible. The result, to me, is lack of polish. A rigorous and fearless edit might have done wonders with what ought to have been a marvelous story.

On another front, I prefer a little more restraint in my sex scenes. A matter of taste, yes, I realize that; but still.

I can't let this pass without a mention: by page 117, the author has handled the physical descriptions of not one, not two, but three female characters using the amateurish device of having them study their reflections in a mirror.

Probably I should have stopped at the first one.

(Abandoned; unrated.)

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LibraryThing member adawn

HATED it.

I’ll just state straight out that I did not like this book. I didn’t hate it, but reading it was a chore every step of the way.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse is a long, long book. Almost 700 pages. Unnecessarily long. Mosse likes to describe every bloody thing in the book. Every flower that

the main character Alais looks at, from its colour to the way it slopes in the wind, is described, and I just don’t care.

It’s a semi-interesting story. The bandwagon plot of protecting/discovering the Grail (authors really need to stop with this one now). It really only gets good in the last 100 pages, and the whole story could have been told in that space.

It’s small positive parts are heavily outweighed by the crap. The length, the predictability, the stupid parallels (Alais/Alice, please). Not recommended.

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LibraryThing member jmattas

The "grand mystery" in this book is in itself quite fascinating, with a secret society sworn to protect the "Truth of the Holy Grail". Also, the two storylines progressing in different centuries and slowly intertwining with each other were well realized. The historical background, the cathars, the

inquisition, was also interesting, especially the scenes from Carcassonne, where I visited last summer.

The book has a lot of good material to it, but where it fails is the writing. It's plain bad storytelling, trash literature. There's needless tension and everything is exaggerated. There are too many similar scenes, e.g. kidnappings, all of which are described similarly.

It just feels embarrassing at times. The book could have gone much deeper in so many ways.

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LibraryThing member Apolline

In this book we meet Alice, a volunteer worker at an archaeological dig in France, invited by her friend to join in. Alice was going to France anyway, hence she had inherited the property of an old aunt she had never heard about. By coincidence Alice discovers a cave with to bodies in it, along

with a ring and a picture of a Labyrinth drawn on the wall. We also meet Alaïs, a young woman living in Carcasonne in 1209. The society in southern France is changing, due to crusaders ripping up the area in their search for heretics.

I have to admit I have mixed feelings about this book. The description of the plot seems so exciting and promising, and it is to a certain extend, but I have to admit I am a bit disappointed. It could be so much more, because the plot in itself is a creative and good idea, but the implement is rather poor. At first I thought it was because I read the Norwegian translation and maybe the translator had done an extremely poor job. The language was bad, or the translation was BAD. But then I read a few reviews at Amazon, and many seemed to have gotten the same impression as me. I therefore conclude that the language is bad. And many of the descriptions too, the whole book is filled with typical clichés and I guess these two combined sort of ruined it for me. The point of view shifted between too many characters too.

All in all I am disappointed, the story could be so much more! It does have potential, but sadly it did not live up to it.

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LibraryThing member crashingwaves38

Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig, finds herself in the midst of mystery and danger as she uncovers something that sets into motion events precipitated by the past.

It took me quite a while to get into this book. There were too many names to keep track of (something that didn't really

change, but at least I became accustomed to the names and could somewhat keep track of them as time progressed). I feel like the author bounced around from point to point and never fully explained some things.

From the beginning, though, Alais' story was of greater interest to me than Alice's. Even at the end, I was more interested in how Alais and the conclusion of her story than I was in Alice. After all, I knew where Alice was heading; I didn't know where and how Alais' life was ended, nor what happened to the Grail.

About halfway through, I started becoming interested in the novel as a whole. Prior to that point, the story was a mass of names and people I didn't know, couldn't keep track of, and didn't care about. Around halfway through or so, the author started focusing on telling the stories themselves rather than dealing with other things, and it all started meshing.

It's a fairly well-written story. The only stylistic complaint I have is about the use of present tense; I'm simply not accustomed to it, and I find it inconsistent that she only used it in the prologue and the epilogue. It was very jarring to read. Once the first chapter began with past tense, the edges smoothed out a bit.

I think one of Mosse's failings is that she didn't make us care enough about the characters. I was never invested in Shelagh or in Will, or in any other minor characters. Certainly not those in the present day. I was more invested in those from the past, and I wish that Mosse had carried some of that forward.

In the end, I enjoyed this book. I don't know that I'll necessarily hang onto it or read it again, but I enjoyed spending the time in its pages that I spent.

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LibraryThing member alaskabookworm

I really didn't like this book. There seemed absolutely no point to it. I pressed on to the end, hoping for a payoff that never came. Not sure why so many people liked it. Compared to "Labyrinth," "The DaVinci Code" reads high-brow.

LibraryThing member TheIdleWoman

I'm afraid I thought very little of this book. I felt that Kate Mosse was jumping on the contemporary Da-Vinci-Code bandwagon, when any book featuring secret brotherhoods and the bloodline of Christ was bound to sell well. And this did. That doesn't change the fact that it is overlong, the plot is

predictable and sometimes downright clumsy, and that it is difficult to care about the characters. I found parts of the book stilted, and others rather immature in style. Several phrases are trotted out over and over again, such as ‘darkness took him’ for when someone falls unconscious. The only thing I gained from reading this book was a desire to visit one day the medieval towns of the South of France. Please, save your money and read Foucault's Pendulum instead. It's the original and the best of these religious-conspiracy novels, mainly because it was written when the Da Vinci Code was still a twinkle in Dan Brown's eye

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LibraryThing member woollymammoth

I read this book for a bookgroup I was about to join, and really hated it. It's just trash I didn't find it enjoyable. Fortunately the rest of my bookgroup hated it too, so I went back. I'm probably going to release it into the wild via bookcrossing.

LibraryThing member knotbox

Two heroines separated by 800 years, whose stories lie entwined by the heritage they share, and the secrets they must protect.

In 2005, in the south of France, Alice Tanner stumbles across a tomb hidden for centuries. By unearthing the artifacts within, she awakens an evil and involuntarily draws

herself into a conflict of greed and religious absolution that has lasted into the present day. In 1209, Alaïs Pelletier du Mas, lives on the brink of a religious war which threatens to sweep across and destroy the south of France. From within her own family comes a sacred task of keeping three books hidden, and a threat which will not only tear them apart, but may destroy the very citadel in which they live.

Labyrinth is filled with mystery and a hint of magic. The books containing the secret of the labyrinth must be found before they can be used for ill, and what begins with a hesitant quest for knowledge for Alice, and an apprehensive preparation for war for Alaïs, starts coming all too fast. Things that could never happen, do happen, and worst fears are confirmed. Linked to her past by dreams and a privately kept family tree, Alice seeks out a historian, the man who appears to have all the answers, and may be more than he appears. In search of answers, she meets Will Franklin who is unwittingly deeply involved in the secret workings of religious devotees and in the eyes of others, heretics.

Labyrinth surprised me. I intended to read it quickly last winter before the mini-series aired, but kept being bogged down with the colorful historical facts of Alaïs's Carcassone and the comparative dullness of Alice's discovery of the cavern and subsequent blackout in the present day. But once I finally began to read this behemoth, I could not put it down, and the heavy difference between the two tales, as similar as they were, made it hard to stop between sections, and left me unable to find a favorite era for Kate Mosse to write in. It turns out that these two stories compliment each other perfectly, and while I prefer the historical richness of Alaïs's life, I don't think her story would have been satisfying on it's own. Alice is our lens, of a sort. She narrates things that she discovers about Alaïs, things that she has been dreaming about her ancestor's life, making it easier for us to understand even as she struggles to comprehend what is going on. This aspect of their connection, introduced early on, serves to connect Alice to her heritage as much as it makes me feel distant from her.

Kate Mosse's characters are vibrant, they interact organically, aside from an awkward sex scene near the beginning, in which Mosse valiantly tries to hide from us who Oriane's lover is. The result is frustrating as much as it is baffling. I was not surprised by the reveal, even as others within the novel reel from the betrayal. And it isn't that the sex is awkward purposefully, I'm sure Kate Mosse just wanted to keep the whole thing tasteful. There are some inequalities in character development, however. In the 13th century, villains sometimes appear as mustache twirlers and bosom-flaunters, and in the present day they are well-dressed sociopaths.

Parallels across the centuries are fantastic: Egyptian secrets invade the home of a socialite, and an old man enchants a young girl with tales of golden sand. The dark haired beauty has a loyal son, and immortality is both longed for and despised. As the tale unfolds, and we discover more about everyone, the story gains depth and richness. Kate Mosse folds you into the lush worlds she is privy to, and can be surprisingly with the breadth of her reach. Invoking chase scenes, dark smokey chambers of royals and subjects and the hunger for violence that we still fear today, Mosse has grasped the full meaning of 'the craft' and demonstrates it here. Her appreciation for the importance of the Bible, of stories within it, and about it, and her love of the Massif Central countryside, cannot be downplayed or overlooked.

There is no code-breaking, no whip-cracking antics, yet Labyrinth enraptures the reader, drawing one in for one mystery after the other. The transition wrenching us from engrossing past to thrilling present is easily forgiven as one races to find out what has happened in the meanwhile...

544pp. Orion. 2005.

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LibraryThing member hides25

Difficult to read, characters unengaging, poor editing.

LibraryThing member KarenRinn

After reading the sleeve and seeing this was a grail story centered around women, I was excited to buy the book. After reading it, I learned this was still a male-dominated grail myth with passive female leads. Hence the lower rating. Not worth buying but a good read from the library.

LibraryThing member Helenliz

Oh dear me. This was really two books in one, with the most spurious connection between the two. On one level you've got a tale of the 1200s in southern France, connected to the Cathar persecution, and the protection of a religious treasure. But the treasure that is in danger isn't actually a

Cathar treasure - but one from a strange mish-mash of religion that is from all creeds and none. Overlaid on this is the same story, with (so you're supposed to accept) descendants of the same people in the first story, who have, by some strange quirk of genetic fate come to play the same roles 800 years later. The memory transferance betwen Alais/Alice seemed contrived. In a sense, either book would have been OK - it's hardly great literature, but readable - but together it was just terribly far-fetched and ludicrously long. Tosh and I wont be looking the auther out again...

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LibraryThing member Triduana

I was really disappointed with this book. I've been wanting to read it for a while, but noticed it shortly after I'd finished reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and as it sounded similar I decided to leave it a while before I picked it up.

I preferred Dan Brown.

I abandoned this book about a

fifth of the way in. It was incredibly slow-going and the flowery prose, littered with cliche, odd word usage and unnecessary description, was hard work to read. It could have done with a very thorough edit before it made it to print. The main characters lacked personality and I didn't like any of them. After reading that many pages of a book you should feel like you know the characters, but they bored me. I did try to get through it but it felt like a chore to read.

The thing that finally stopped me from reading was the amount of French phrases throughout it. There really was no need. It reminded me of when you write assignments at school and you have to put quotes and references in to prove you know what you're talking about. It frustrated me too much. I get that the author knew what she was talking about; she wrote 500 pages about it.

I read The Winter Ghosts by the same author recently and really enjoyed it, and felt that it should have been longer. After trying to get through Labyrinth I'm glad that it wasn't. I don't think I'll try another book by this author.

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LibraryThing member wdwilson3

The worst thing I've started reading in years. My irritation began at the outset, when in the prologue an archaeological student commits a half dozen procedural errors, each worthy of expulsion. Then, back to the past, 13th century France. The author's tedious, plodding style consists of complete,

exhaustive descriptions of everything -- every object, every locale (with historical notes), every person, every facial expression, every thought, every (overwrought) emotion. Even a little soft-core porn back in the castle couldn't hold my interest. Awful.

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LibraryThing member Elien

I really loved this book!! I read the "Da Vinci Code" and my opinion is: this story is a lot better!! I certainly loved the ending, because it was (in some ways) exactly the opposite of what I thought it would have been. The story itself was very intriguing.
This story made me decide the subject of

my next speaking exercise: the Cathars and the crusade against them.

Mostly I have a lot of difficulties concentrating on books, but with this one I had no difficulties at all.

I'm reading "Sepulchre" now. I've only just started reading it, but I hope it's going to be as good as "Labyrinth".

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LibraryThing member susanbevans

Kate Mosse's Labyrinth is a new take on the quest for the Holy Grail. The book switches back and forth between present day and then back several hundreds of years ago, describing the story of the Grail from the perspective of two courageous women born 800 years apart. It is hard to summarize

without giving too much away, so I'm going to review the book without a summary.

It is sometimes difficult to read a novel that jumps back and forth in time. The reader has to be able to keep up with two sets of characters, two historical periods, two settings... it can be a real nightmare to read. Fortunately, Kate Mosse's Labyrinth is not confusing at all. The past is easily linked to the present, and the sequence of events is flawlessly portrayed for the reader. The parallel storytelling in this book makes for an ultimately unique and rewarding read.

The main characters of Labyrinth were compelling and well-developed. In the year 1209, Alaïs, a plucky 17-year-old living in the French city of Carcassone, and her counterpart Alice Tanner, a volunteer on an archaeological dig in the South of France, were generously drawn, strong female protagonists. At times when I was bogged down in details, it was the fascinating and engrossing stories of Alice and Alaïs that kept me reading. The characters in this novel leap off the page with stunning clarity. Once you begin reading their stories, you won't be able to stop.

Mosse's narrative style is unhurried and methodical, sometimes giving too much detail for this reader's taste. Despite the fact that the reader must wade through all of the minutiae of the history of the Cathers and the Crusades in France, the stories woven into the fabric of history are well worth reading.

With an intricate plot and believable characters, Kate Mosse's Labyrinth is brilliant and riveting. The story was captivating and the historical aspects fascinating. Labyrinth was different and astonishingly authentic, and in the end, worth reading. I'm glad I finished it, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, christian fiction, or is interested in Grail lore.

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LibraryThing member iankg

Have been meaning to read this for ages - ever since I saw the author's name and rather stupidly wondered if it was the supermodel... Labyrinth certainly gripped me from the start, although the rather irritating and unnecessary present tense through the first chapter had me worried... The two key

characters (Alais and Alice) were likable if not particularly deep, and Mosse spins her yarn in a way that keeps the pages turning.

The end was something of a disappointment - not the end in the sense of what happens to the characters, which was moving if slightly predictable. Rather, the end in the sense of the final explanation for the Grail. Mosse had been building a new myth around (or underneath, or between) the existing ones, which had looked to be quite fun whilst admittedly drivel. However, right at the end it all seems to fizzle away to nothing - more could have been done with that, I feel.

A good holiday read, as someone else described it. It has rather whetted my appetite to see the region!

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LibraryThing member heidijane

This book was an enjoyable read, and kept me interested with the history and mystery elements. However, it is probably overlong, with too much detail in places, and some of the characters are somewhat two-dimensional. Also it was very confusing in the beginning as there were lots of different

people involved (both good and bad) and it was difficult to keep track. Having finished reading, I'm still not convinced that all the loose ends were tied up properly, but given that it was so long anyway, that may not be a bad thing.That all sounds very negative - I did enjoy it, and I enjoyed the flipping between the twelfth century and the present day. It was an interesting and gripping story and I would be interested in reading other books by the author.

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