Kate Mosse's new book Autumn is, in the words of its Guardian reviewer, a "love-song to West Sussex." The best-selling author of Labyrinth turns from historical fiction to personal reflection, writing on the turning of the seasons and the lore and landscape of the county she has made her own.

The book forms part of a series designed to draw out its authors' personal connections to a home landscape. The sequence opened last year with Michael Morpurgo welcoming spring in Devon, where he has lived at the farm that inspired War Horse for more than 50 years. Val McDermid followed, celebrating winter in Scotland, where she grew up and still lives. Bernardine Evaristo will take on summer in a forthcoming volume. Mosse, the reviewer notes, is "deeply and endearingly rooted in her chosen patch."

That rootedness runs through generations. Mosse grew up in the village of Fishbourne. She now lives in Chichester, where she first got to know her husband when the pair revised for A-levels in the shadow of the Bishop's Palace. They held hands on the day she turned 17, at the city's annual Sloe Fair. Twenty-three years later, they celebrated her 40th birthday at the same fair, this time with their children.

Today the couple shares their home with the author's 90-something mother-in-law, Granny Rosie, whom Mosse describes as "Sussex to her bones." Granny Rosie remembers watching cattle herded through fields where a supermarket now stands — a single image that captures the book's preoccupation with time, change and the persistence of place.

The series formula — one writer, one season, one home territory — gives Autumn its shape. Where Morpurgo brought half a century of Devon farming life to spring and McDermid brought Scottish childhood to winter, Mosse brings the layered memory of a Sussex family to the harvest season: village life in Fishbourne, coming of age in Chichester, and the slow accretion of local lore.

The reviewer frames the result as "tender reflections on time and place," with Mosse's affection for her county carrying the book's personal register. The details are modest and domestic — A-level revision, a fairground birthday, an elderly relative's recollections — but they anchor a larger meditation on how landscape holds a life.

With Evaristo's summer volume still to come, the series is set to complete its four-season cycle of British writers mapping the places that made them. Mosse's contribution suggests the project's strength lies less in grand description than in the intimate, verifiable texture of one writer's ground.