Labyrinth

by Kate Mosse Book 1 in the Languedoc Trilogy series.

First published 2005

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3.7(65,459)

Carcassonne, July 1209. As crusading forces advance into Languedoc, seventeen-year-old Alaïs Pelletier receives a book containing part of a secret associated with the true Grail. Her father entrusts her with protecting it, but the siege divides families and exposes the Cathar community and its defenders to conquest, betrayal and religious persecution.

In 2005, volunteer archaeologist Alice Tanner discovers two skeletons and a labyrinth-marked ring in a cave in the French Pyrenees. The find draws her into a struggle over manuscripts, memory and inheritance whose origins lie in Alaïs’s world. The novel combines the Albigensian Crusade with a modern conspiracy, using two women separated by eight centuries to explore belief, violence and the survival of suppressed history.