About Kate Morton

Writer of books.

Video: In Conversation with Bookaccino

Carol Fitzgerald from BookReporter is a huge champion of books, and does a brilliant job of connecting readers and writers. I was so glad to be able to speak with Carol again recently; and, this time, as part of the Bookaccino Live Book Group series, I was doubly thrilled to be able to answer readers’ questions directly.

We spoke about what it was like to write during the pandemic, and the way that period affected all of our perspectives (whether we were trying to write books or simply to keep our lives on track); how I write and whether I know the ending at the start; what it’s like juggling multiple story threads; the importance of houses and landscapes in my novels; how I develop my storylines; and how being a writer compares with what I imagined it might be like before I was published.

So, make yourself a cup of tea (or a glass of wine, depending on your time zone and according to your wont) and enjoy the conversation. If you prefer to listen, you’ll find the podcast HERE. And, my previous chat with Carol, recorded when Homecoming was first published in 2023, is HERE.

Video: In Conversation with Bookaccino2024-05-01T07:59:19+01:00

Video: In Conversation with BorrowBox

A week or so ago, I had the pleasure of talking all things books and writing with Natasha Boyd from BorrowBox. As a lifelong library lover, it was a privilege to be able to speak to so many librarians, along with devoted readers of all kinds.

Our conversation ranged far and wide, covering the writing and editing process, the ideas behind Homecoming, the challenges of writing during a global pandemic, the difficulty of bestowing titles on novels, my childhood habit of losing library books, and my eternal fascination with time (and the tethering of the present to the past).

The event ended with a fun segment in which I answered questions from viewers, including whether I use the typewriter pictured over my left shoulder to write my books. (Spoiler: it was the plan, until I made an attempt and realised I was going to need to build my finger muscles significantly before I could match the typists of old.)

Video: In Conversation with BorrowBox2024-04-18T00:28:43+01:00

Essay: Picnics, Pandemics, and Coming Home; or, The Origins of Homecoming

In February 2020, I was writing a different book. We’d been living in London for five years, and my sister and her family were due to arrive for a three-week stay. I had seen reports, mid-way through the nightly news, of a novel flu-like virus in Wuhan, accompanied by unfamiliar images of rapidly erected temporary hospital wards. But there are often disquieting stories about faraway places at the mid-point of the news bulletin, and when my sister told me they were going to wear masks on the plane, I thought she was being overly cautious.

By the time they arrived, we were wiping down café tables and there was no hand sanitizer to be found in any of the local Boots pharmacies; we went to Bath for a day trip, and as we filed through the museum, I glanced around the over-heated, over-crowded room, and had the sudden, distinct feeling that we wouldn’t be doing anything like it again for a while; at the railway station, afterwards, waiting for the train back to London, the cousins played chase in the cold, darkening February afternoon, the child who was ‘it’ threatening, ‘I’m the Coronavirus!’, and I thought about ‘Ring-a-ring-a-rosie’ and stories of the plague, and the way children take the happenings in their world and turn them into sport, and a shiver made its way up my spine.

A week after my sister and her family left for Australia, we followed. It was mid-March. My children had been sent home from school with learning packs and advice that lessons would be going online for the term; flight routes were being rapidly cancelled. With our parents and grandparents in Australia, and the new virus appearing to target older people, it seemed prudent to go home for a visit while we could still get seats. As we flew over Europe, I looked down through the plane window and thought: ‘I’ll see you soon.’ I assumed we’d be back by the summertime when the pandemic had ended. I had a research trip planned for the book that I was writing; the list of people to contact and sites to visit was long, and I was looking forward to getting started.

*

I will remember that flight from London for as long as I live: we had managed to procure masks from a small neighbourhood hardware store, but there were other passengers in full hazmat suits. In Singapore, our temperatures were taken three times before we reached the main terminal of the airport; in the lounge, we were informed it would be closing indefinitely that evening. Trump was on the television sets, flights were dropping off the boards, and we crossed our fingers and hoped our last leg back to Australia wouldn’t be cancelled before we could get airborne.

Long haul travel is always discombobulating—the sense of having been transported in a metal tube through a chute from one side of the planet to the other—lights constantly on, food constantly served, music constantly piped—and to swap northern winter for southern summer is ever a shock to the system. But landing in March 2020 was even more surreal than usual. The reality of the pandemic hadn’t yet reached Australia: people were crowded together in airport coffee shops; we were crammed into a transfer bus with coughing and sneezing passengers from all over the world; our taxi driver waved away suggestion that he might want to wear a mask. ‘The virus isn’t in Australia,’ he told us, ignoring the fact that we had just arrived from London, where the virus most certainly was. We kept our masks on as he drove us from Adelaide airport to our farm in the Hills.

In the sunlit stillness, after his car disappeared down the winding driveway, we stood blinking at one another, tired and stunned, our suitcases strewn across the brick pavers at the back of the house. I had the key in my bag, but we didn’t go inside. Not at once. The garden was in late summer glory—roses with heavy heads, plane trees with leaves the size of dinner plates, gum trees on the hill across the valley, their skins glistening silver. The cherry tomatoes—seeded wild amongst the roses long-ago—were ripe on the vines, the air rich with their sun-warmed tang. Bird song was general—rainbow lorikeets, blackbirds, fairy wrens, honeyeaters. It was an enchanted place, untouched by what was happening beyond.

*

It’s easy now to forget how uncertain the early months of the pandemic were. For us, finding ourselves suddenly on a remote farm—the sun inconceivably bright, the paddocks yellowed by the recent Black Summer heat—made time lengthen and bend. Our neighbours on the other side of the distant fences supplied us with fresh vegetables and pandemic essentials upon arrival—headlice wash for the kids (of course!), a bottle of gin for us, and, as good luck would have it, four hens and a self-important rooster in need of a new home.

As the fourteen days of mandatory home quarantine (and then lockdown) stretched on, we took to walking laps around the perimeter, through the paddocks and along the shallow creek that widened to a waterhole beneath the gnarled old willow trees. The kids would run ahead, waving sticks as swords, gambolling through long grass as the sun melted into the western ridge; we sat and ate sometimes on the sloping hills, just us and the cows and the pink-and-grey galahs in the sky.

One of the strangest sensations in those disconcerting days, was hearing, and then seeing, the occasional plane overhead. Flights had all but ceased by then, and we would stop and stare in surprise when the drone of an engine caught our attention, watching as the small faraway bird unzipped the distant sky. Life had returned to an earlier era: we shopped differently, cooked differently, filled time in unexpected new ways.

Everything was topsy turvy, not least because the time difference meant the kids were logging on for remote school at 6pm and working through until one in the morning. Our days started late, and the afternoons were long. I was trying to write, but it wasn’t going well. The news was a constant distraction—I found it hard to settle to a fictional world when the real one held so many daily surprises—and the European story that I’d started, its setting and characters, its scenes that had been vivid and real only days and weeks before, now seemed desperately far away.

As the weeks (and then months) went by, living near my extended family, in the country of my childhood, I found myself thinking about what it means to come home. As world events continued to spin faster, and I willed the centre to hold, I kept landing on TS Eliot’s line about ‘the still point of the turning world’. Past and present, and the site where the two meet, is an eternal theme within my novels; similarly, place, is of profound importance. I drew enormous comfort from the landscape around me—ancient gum trees, birds going about their business, creeks flowing onwards through valleys—natural sights and smells that I knew intrinsically; and at a certain point I realised that I needed to put aside my European manuscript and write instead about the place that I was in, here and now.

A story had started to form in my mind, fed as ideas always are, by the sights and sounds, the worries and thoughts and dreams, of my daily experience. I have often reflected that novels are time capsules of their author’s life during the period in which they were written; in another time and place, the same idea would necessarily take on a different form. It is little surprise, then, that while circumstances had me reflecting on notions of home and belonging, as I found myself living—quite unexpectedly—on a farm in the Adelaide Hills, these elements infused my imagination.

Heightened historical moments tend to sharpen one’s senses, and inspiration was everywhere. In Port Elliot, a small town on the Fleurieu Peninsula that looks across the ocean towards Antarctica, I noticed a cliff-top house with a sign reading ‘Halcyon’, and thought what a beautiful, hopeful name it was to bestow upon one’s home – how ripe for narrative irony. On the shoreline at Port Willunga, I marvelled at the rich assortment of smooth, coloured stones deposited daily by the sea, and wondered, as I followed the bush track back to where we’d parked, about the people who lived in the wooden houses adjoining the quiet, startling beach; what had led them to this place, this life of apparent serenity.

One day in the winter of 2020, I drove an hour and a half north to the wine-growing region of Clare. I had heard about an imposing old house with a tragic story attached. Despite having been told of its grandeur, nothing could have prepared me for the moment that we came upon Martindale Hall. Like a proud ship, rising from the flat, dry earth, two enormous palms punctuating the Georgian entrance, drawing the eye towards the elaborate Italianate roof. It was breath-taking to see something so unexpected: an English-style mansion, transplanted so completely from one culture into a vastly different landscape. Taking in the sundial at the front, with its grave Latin warning about the years given and time’s propensity to flee, Ozymandias came to mind: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land/ Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert.’

Martindate Hall

Shelley knew. Martindale was intact, but it gave the same sense of glory days past. The house made me melancholy, standing tall within its empty garden, the ‘lone and level sands’ stretching away on every side; it was in stark contrast to the photographs displayed inside, of prosperous Edwardians enjoying a way of life and dress and habit long since sunk. I thought about the past and the present, the way time moves—the years given and then fled, as the sundial warned—the houses we build and the values with which we invest them, the hopes and dreams that turn them into homes.

*

As lockdowns continued, and the Australian borders closed indefinitely, I realised that we were not going to be returning to the UK as and when we’d expected; and so, at the same time that I was reflecting on what it meant to come home, I felt homesick for my life in London. The experience was one of extreme dissonance, and to find relief, I wrote. Scenes in which Isabel, an English woman living in South Australia, prepares for a lunch party and glances across the western lawn to where the gums stand tall and ghostly on the ridge; in which, on a sweltering Christmas Eve, Percy leads his horse along the willow-lined creek to the point that it widens into a waterhole made for swimming; in which Jess, seeking comfort in the Charles Dickens Museum at King’s Cross, London, receives a phone call summoning her home to Sydney.

Even now, if I chance to read those early chapters, as Jess scurries along Perrins Lane, past the Waterstones on Hampstead High Street and down Flask Walk, I can feel the cold air hitting my warm cheeks, see the Georgian buildings with their mottled glass, elegant and wonderful, feel the golden glow of fairy lights in the lead up to Christmas—and I am overcome with a blend of yearning and loss and—still—disbelief. I can touch my old life; the fact that it is past is a surprise every time. So, too, the smell of wattle flowers, as Percy rides his horse along the quiet narrow road in his prologue, is visceral; I feel the warmth of the Australian sun, beating through his shirt onto my own skin.

I don’t have all the answers yet, as to what home is, what it means to belong, whether one can ever truly ‘come home’. I have written in Homecoming about the places I call home: Jess’s North London neighbourhood, Polly’s weatherboard worker’s cottage on the slopes of Brisbane, the Turner family’s homestead in the Adelaide Hills. But home is, of course, more complicated than that. Jess decides that home isn’t a place or a time or a person, though it can be any and all of those things: home, she reasons, is a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of home isn’t ‘away’, it’s ‘lonely’.

It is trite, perhaps, to say that one is never lonely if one has a book—the adage is beloved and well-worn; but it is also true. Homecoming is a book about home and belonging born out of a time of great change. But it is more than that to me. It has been a home of sorts over the past couple of years, when everything else was uncertain, and it is a pleasure, after a period of composition even more solitary than usual, finally to welcome readers inside.

Kate Morton, March 2023

Essay: Picnics, Pandemics, and Coming Home; or, The Origins of Homecoming2024-04-23T02:34:09+01:00

Notes: On Cornwall

The following note about my love affair with Cornwall, featured in a Special Edition of The Lake House, published in the UK in 2016. Reading it now, some years later, in a room on the opposite side of the globe from that in which I wrote it, I am struck by how keenly I long to walk those coastal cliff paths again. For now, alas, I will have to rely on my memories and the magic of words to transport me.

I hope this piece delivers you, too, to the windswept Cornish coastline, and conveys at least some of the enchantment of the place.

 

On Cornwall

I’ve been involved in a long-distance love affair with Cornwall for as long as a I can remember: it’s such a beautiful, unique, and enchanting place to visit, whether in person or in my imagination. I’m a very visual person and most inspired when I have interesting things to look at. Country or city, inside or out, natural or otherwise, I’m not particular: I love landscapes and laneways; the sky and the sea; chimney tops, hidden doorways and beautiful gardens.

I also love music, art and theatre, and of course history, in particular that cool, shivery sense that the past still surrounds us. Most of all, I’m drawn to places that make me feel something, and Cornwall—with its windy coastlines and spectacular wildflowers, its abundant gardens and pretty whitewashed cottages, its enveloping atmosphere of history, mystery, myth and magic—is just such a place.

When I was dreaming up The Lake House, I wanted a setting that leant itself to a story in which an abandoned house might be rapidly consumed by nature. Loeanneth in the 1930s, when we meet the Edevane family, is a place of pristine cultivation, of well-kept gardens, and efficient household staff, the country home of a genteel family leading a genteel life. It is a locus amoenus, of course, a ‘delightful place’; and, as is usual with this literary trope, it provides an idealised location of enclosure and containment that engenders a sense of belonging in the characters.

But, by situating the house and its gardens in the midst of such a wild and rugged landscape, surrounded by thick woods and within hearing distance of crashing ocean waves, it was all too easy to imagine how quickly nature would come to reclaim the estate after tragedy struck and the family moved away. Seventy years later, when Sadie Sparrow, a detective on leave, stumbles upon the once-elegant house and garden, she discovers a vastly different scene from that in 1933: a real-life sleeping beauty house, waiting for the truth to awaken it.

When I was finishing The Lake House, I was able to spend the summer in Cornwall. It was a truly surreal experience, like stepping into the pages of my own book and having the world of the story come to life around me. I walked the very cliff-top paths that Sadie runs along, looked out across the same rugged coastline and vast ocean, and visited country houses just like Loeanneth would have been before the Edevane family locked it up and left.

One of my favourite houses was Trerice, near Newquay, an Elizabethan Manor set amidst an estate of gorgeous gardens. I visited a number of times, and on one occasion, the weather was particularly stunning. It was one of those perfect August days when the air holds just the right amount of warmth and it seems as if time might stand still. The sky was a clear, bright blue, and the leaves and flowers of the garden were glistening. It reminded me very much of how Loeanneth would have looking on Midsummer’s Eve morning in June 1933, as final preparations were put in place for the party that night.

I loved driving along the narrow, winding Cornish roads, hedgerows growing tall on either side, rounding the corner to discover yet another village waiting to be explored. One of my favourites was Portloe: I could just imagine Bertie’s place, high on the hill amongst the other whitewashed cottages, overlooking the harbour and wide, blue ocean.

Some of the most breathtaking cliff walks I found were on the north coast. We spent a particularly glorious summer’s day near Boscastle, where the wildflowers were thick with bumble bees, gulls soared above the sea, and contented cows and horses ignored us as they grazed in the nearby fields. Walking such beautiful trails, as the waves crashed against the bottom of the cliffs, and the sky loomed above us, was truly exhilarating.

Tracing my characters’ paths over the summer, I came to know Cornwall in a new and deeper way. Our love affair is no longer one of distance. I have seen and felt and smelled and heard it for myself, and gained new ideas for other stories. Cornwall is a special place, one in which I feel anchored and inspired, and one I know I’ll return to, both in person, and in my novels, many more times.

Kate Morton, London, 2015

Notes: On Cornwall2024-04-25T14:46:51+01:00

Video: Interview with Bookreporter

It’s always a pleasure to talk books with Carol Fitzgerald at Bookreporter, and I was thrilled to have the chance to discuss HOMECOMING at length after its publication in April 2023. Happily, I will be speaking with Carol again for a Bookaccino Live Event on the 24th April 2024, at 8pm ET.

If you’d like to attend, you can register HERE, or via the image below, and find out how to submit a question or your own, or even how to ask it yourself during the event.

Video: Interview with Bookreporter2024-04-11T02:42:36+01:00

Notes: On Writing, Reading, and Alchemy

A friend asked me recently what I love most about writing; I had to stop and think for a minute, searching for a way to explain. There are, of course, many parts of the writing process that I love. There’s a week, at the very end of the structural edit, when all of the efforts of the preceding year or two (or three) spent building the book, the copious drafts and revisions, and scribbled out lines and rewritten scenes, come together at last to enact a magic – the flicking of a switch so that the story leaps to life, a three-dimensional world, with moving parts and real people, that can be looked at from every angle and reveal no holes, no leftover scaffolding, no walls waiting to be finished. The thrill of that moment is worth every second of the long and winding road to get there.

I also love having written. It’s a great feeling at the end of the day, to know that I have managed to lock down in words an emotion or a thought or a complicated idea that’s been flitting through my mind, all effervescence and light, resisting capture. Sometimes, there are even rare, precious instants when I am a magician, and all of the world’s secrets and mysteries are known to me – that flash, when the roller-coaster grazes the high point before submitting to the rush of free fall is pure exhilaration.

But then, there are times when writing a book threatens to drive me mad. For one thing, it takes so long to get the whole thing out of my head and onto the page. There is no instant gratification. It’s like doing a puzzle that requires over a year – sometimes two – to figure out. More accurately: it’s like doing thousands of small puzzles, some of them simultaneously, that all lock together to form a larger one, that then needs to be solved, frequently involving the undoing of the previously completed parts, with no guarantee of success. There are countless tiny ideas to be wrangled with. Hundreds of decisions to be made each day. For someone who sees every shade of grey, this can be a special kind of hell.

There’s the challenge, too, of illustrating the inner lives of characters. Animating them with desires and doubts and self-regard and self-pity, of showing them to readers without telling too much, of revealing the parts of their nature that they don’t wish to share. Of creating settings with a sense of place so vivid that the reader believes they’ve been there. Of conducting meticulous research and then concealing all evidence of it. Of choosing the right word, the best word, in every instance; of going back and fixing, changing, improving, ensuring things are as tight as they can be. Of making it look easy. Of never reaching the lofty standards one sets; of knowing that the reality will never, ever match the sheer, unbounded potential that the project promised at its inception; that one cannot help but fail simply by attempting to move the story from the dream world to the real.

And it’s relentless. I never stop thinking about the book I’m working on. If I do, the world I’m trying to build falls away. It can make for a very busy brain, particularly when one adds in all of the real-life people and things that are going on simultaneously and want – need! – attention. For months, towards the end, I long to be finished and to have a break. And yet. When I’m not doing it, the sense of something missing is profound – not once ever, no matter how desperate I was to complete a book, have I typed ‘The End’ and managed to pass a full twenty-four hours without procuring a notebook for the next set of ideas, thoughts, problems. . .

Listening to this description of the process, my friend seemed perplexed; she wanted to know how I managed with all of those characters and storylines in my head each day. She said it sounded stressful. I’d never thought about it that way, but suddenly I looked at her and perceived the alternative: How could she bear to be without them. It must be somehow . . . empty.

And then I realised that she wasn’t without them. 

My friend is a reader. Both writing and reading are considered solitary pursuits, and it’s true that I sit alone for most of the day, every day, communing with figments of my own imagination and doing battle with my limits as a wordsmith. But the act of publication is, as the root of the word suggests, ‘public’. And this is where we enter that much-mythologised realm of storytelling, for which at least two people are required: one to tell the story, the other to receive it. A book is merely a series of words on a page until somebody picks it up and begins to read; and, of course, a reader does far more than just receive. It is they who bring the story back to life, a unique version of itself, fuelled by their imagination, dependent for colour and nuance on their life experience.

My words, their interpretation, a joint creation.

To be part of this marvellous alchemy is a wonder indeed. It’s been almost twenty years since I started writing the manuscript that would become The Shifting Fog/The House at Riverton. Seventeen years since I first saw my name on the cover of a book. I’ve published seven novels, over one million words of fiction. There are at least sixteen million copies of my books in print, in languages I’ll never speak, in countries I might never see. By any definition, I am not new to this. And yet, it never grows old.

I cannot truthfully say that I love every moment of the writing process – it can be demanding, and by turns exhilarating and awful (and everything in between) – but I do love being a writer. It is a joy to create something out of nothing, to put my own thoughts and feelings about the human experience into words, and then send them out into the world where a reader might say, ‘I feel that too’. And it is a true privilege to be part of that meeting of minds that occurs each time one of my books is read, no matter where, when, or by whom, and the worlds that I dreamed about and built, the people and places I have loved, come back in brand-new forms, living and breathing once more.

Kate Morton, March 2023

Notes: On Writing, Reading, and Alchemy2024-04-25T14:39:27+01:00

HOMECOMING is a LibraryReads Pick for April

It was an honour this week to learn that HOMECOMING has been selected as a LibraryReads pick for April 2023. Libraries have played a huge and happy part in my life — whether the small, stuffy room upstairs near the principal’s office at Tamborine Mountain State School, or the council library near Staffsmith’s Park at Eagle Heights, they have been places of infinite pleasure and possibility. I’m delighted to take this opportunity to send a shout-out to libraries and, most importantly, librarians everywhere — thank you for everything that you do and the joyous spaces you provide!

I recorded a thank you message, which you can listen to HERE as part of the Library Love Fest Podcast; or, for those who prefer to read, here it is in text:

Hello, this is Kate Morton, author of Homecoming, getting in touch to say how honoured I am to be selected by librarians of America as a LibraryReads pick for April.

I’m especially pleased because libraries – and librarians – have played such an important role in my life. Growing up on Tamborine Mountain, a small misty village in the beautiful subtropical rainforest of south-east Queensland, there wasn’t a lot – of an official nature – for kids to do. One thing we did have, was a council library, and some of my favourite memories are of the days mum would take us to renew our library books. Of course, the day always started with a panic because I was not the tidiest child, and I read books in all sorts of weird and wonderful places – tucked behind the sofa, on the shed roof, in the bough of an avocado tree – for some reason, squirrelling myself away to read always made the pleasure that much greater – so there was always a bit of a mad rush to find my library books.

But oh – the wonder of the Tamborine Mountain Library! To adult eyes, it was perhaps an ordinary sort of place: there was nothing objectively charming about the building. A small, single-level square of pale 1980s brick, industrial carpet and plain metal shelves – but none of that was apparent to me at the time. To my eyes, it was a wonderland. I might as well have tumbled with Alice down the rabbit hole.

That smell of paper and ink and possibility; the cli-clunk sound of the date stamp being punched decidedly at the desk; the way time disappeared as I lost myself between the stacks, sliding first this book and then that one from the shelf; and then, the almost uncontainable joy of heading back out the door and down the garden path with a small pile of potential new friends clutched in my hands.

My character, Jess, in HOMECOMING, has remarkably similar fond childhood memories of visiting the library. And why wouldn’t she: libraries are magical places, and librarians, wonderful people – booklovers, of course, but also listeners, empathisers, matchmakers responsible for connecting books to readers. I’ve been reflecting lately on that connection. I love to think that each time one of my books is read, no matter where, when, or by whom, there occurs a meeting of minds across time and place, in which a unique version of the story is created. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping that to happen, and for everything you do in the service of promoting books and reading.

I’m especially pleased that you’ve chosen HOMECOMING for the LibraryReads list because it’s a very special book for me. I started writing it at the beginning of the pandemic when I returned from London to Australia. I was thinking a lot about home and belonging and what it means to ‘come home’, and during uncertain times the manuscript, the world of the book, became a home of sorts for me. It’s very exciting then, after a period of composition even more solitary than usual, finally to be able to share it; and it’s incredibly gratifying to know that you connected with HOMECOMING.

And so, once again, my sincere thanks to the librarians of America: it’s a privilege to have a place on your shelves and a great honour to be chosen as a Library Reads Pick. Until we meet again, may I take this opportunity to wish you all much happy reading.

Photo note: The author as small, serious person, pictured alongside her school library card from 1982-83.

HOMECOMING is a LibraryReads Pick for April2023-03-20T02:28:32+00:00

US & Canada, HOMECOMING Virtual Book Tour

I’m thrilled to announce three virtual events being held in April to celebrate Homecoming’s release. Events are open to US and Canadian readers, and are presented by Mariner Books, Simon & Schuster Canada, and some of the finest booksellers around; I’ll be in conversation each evening with a bookseller or fellow writer, before taking part in a moderated audience Q&A.

For further details, and to book your ticket, please follow THIS LINK.

I so hope you can attend, and very much look forward to discussing Homecoming, writing, families, secrets, big old houses, the past and the present, belonging, coming home, and so much more.

US & Canada, HOMECOMING Virtual Book Tour2023-03-18T00:58:24+00:00

Preview: Would you like to read the opening of HOMECOMING?

My publishers have made the prologue available ahead of publication and I’m beyond excited that at last you’re going to meet these characters, this place, that mean so much to me. I started writing HOMECOMING in 2020, in the early months of the pandemic, when my family and I found our lives transposed from London to a farmhouse in the Adelaide Hills. It was a surreal time, but ultimately a creative one. Of all my books, HOMECOMING draws most closely on the landscape that inspired it: many of the sights, smells and sounds you’ll find within these pages are drawn from my own life (even if the events that occur are not!). It’s a true pleasure to share them with you and to welcome you inside a book that has been a home of sorts for me over the past few years.  

To enter the world of HOMECOMING, simply open this DOOR and step on through.

To preorder the complete novel, select your favourite bookseller by following the links on my HOMECOMING page.

Happy reading!

Preview: Would you like to read the opening of HOMECOMING?2023-02-17T20:20:28+00:00

Goodbye 2022, Hello Homecoming

This is the sun setting on December 31, 2022.

And I have to admit, I watched it slip beyond the horizon with some degree of satisfaction. I’ve tried to write an account of the year a few times now, but to date the twists and turns have resisted my attempts to wrangle them into a neat summary. Suffice to say, and to quote Dickens, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

One of the best parts was finishing Homecoming and knowing that I would have a story to share with you this year. Writing novels can be an isolating pursuit: I spend a lot of my time alone at my desk, thinking, dreaming, and worrying over people who exist, to that point, only in my mind, and yet who feel — who are — entirely real to me. This period of handover, when they cease to be solely mine, and take up residence in your imaginations, too, is surreal and scary and wonderful.

The first ideas for Homecoming came to me in the early months of the pandemic, when my family and I returned to Australia from London for what we thought would be a few months. Removed from the bustling city to a farm in South Australia, from late winter to the last long days of summer, I thought a lot about home and belonging, and kept coming back to the T.S. Eliot line about ‘the still point of the turning world’. That is where I felt myself to be, as global events churned and swirled beyond.

I had begun work on another book in March 2020, but finding myself in a garden full of fruit trees and vines and late season roses, passing jet-lagged days in the shade of an old walnut tree (beloved of a clutch of big black cockatoos), I lost touch with my previous plans and a new picture started to form. Images came to me of a man on a horse, and a family living in a stone farmhouse, and a shocking scene beneath a willow on the edge of a sun-warmed creek, and I knew that this was the story I had to tell.

By now, some of you will have received (and even read!) advanced editions of Homecoming. I have loved seeing your early reviews online and knowing that you connected with the characters and story. Thank you for taking the time to pen them. For a writer, it’s a little like receiving postcards from abroad to say that a much-loved family member, travelling alone for the first time, has found kindred spirits out there in the big, wide world.

As always, you can pre-order a copy of Homecoming from one of the booksellers listed here on my WEBSITE or via your favourite local bookshop. I’ve been busy signing stacks of tip-in sheets for special editions in the UK and US, and will soon let you know the details of where and when you can find them.

For US readers there’s currently an opportunity to win an advanced proof copy over at Goodreads (see details at the end of this post), and for everyone else, I’ll be sharing an extract from the opening of the novel with my MAILING LIST members next month.

I can’t wait for you to meet Jess, Nora, Polly, Percy, Isabel and the rest of them! Until then, I’m so glad to have the chance to wish you a Happy New Year, and to send my very best to you and yours.

Goodreads is giving away 50 Advanced Reading Editions of Homecoming. The competition is for the US only (with apologies to my other readers; I’ll let you know of any other opportunities) and ends on January 15th 2023. You can enter HERE.

Please note: this competition is run by Goodreads. You will not receive any messages from me via social media or email requesting personal details for prizes, and payment is never requested or required. Stay vigilant against scammers, Team!

. . . and good luck!

Goodbye 2022, Hello Homecoming2023-01-11T13:39:32+00:00
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