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

Update: A New Short Story

Not so long ago, I wrote a short story. I don’t often write short stories, but I was asked by the Museum of Brisbane to contribute to an exhibition they were planning called The Storytellers, in which they proposed to feature short pieces of writing by local authors corresponding with various inner-city suburbs of Brisbane. I believe that sense of place is integral to stories and was drawn to the opportunity to dig deeper into a location that I’d known for decades, to see whether I could find a story hidden there.

I grew up on Tamborine Mountain, a rainforest village that sits upon a plateau within the mountainous ridge that snakes down the eastern seaboard of Australia. Tamborine is about a one hour drive south of Brisbane and, back then, was a world unto itself: a place of great beauty and uniqueness. My grandparents all lived in Brisbane, though, and during the long summer holidays we would make the trip down the windy mountain road and up the Pacific Highway to the ‘big smoke’ to visit them. (I wrote about these childhood trips to Nana Connelly’s house in Stafford in my short essay WE WERE FROM THE MOUNTAINS.)

When I went to university in Brisbane, I came to know the city anew. I met my husband there and we lived in the suburb of Paddington, in the very street (and, for a time, the very house) that Nell does in THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN. Paddington is a suburb of wooden worker’s cottages cut into steep hills, of glossy mango trees heavy with fruit and the bright purple shock of jacarandas; it is a place where bush turkeys roam freely in overgrown gardens and neon pink bougainvillea flowers scale walls, where bats come out at dusk to soar from one towering palm tree to another.

AT HOME ON THE RIVER BEND is set a few kilometres away in South Brisbane, one of the oldest suburbs of Brisbane, tucked within a bend of the snaking brown river that cuts the city in two. It is the story of a place told through the life of a woman who has called it home for a century. We meet Nan on the morning of her hundredth birthday: memories surround her and she is helpless to resist their pull towards the past and, in particular, a long-kept secret.

I sent a link to AT HOME ON THE RIVER BEND to my mailing list last month, but am uploading the story here now so that you can read it, too. I hope you enjoy it! And if you’re not already a member and would like to join the list, you’re welcome to do so HERE.

The photo at the top of this post shows a classic Brisbane sunset from a classic Queensland deck. Neon pink bougainvillea on the balcony in the foreground; a thicket of palms behind, awaiting dusk visitation from the bats; a lone, grand red gum on a slope that would once have been covered with them; and, beyond it all, the subtropical sun melting into the horizon.

The building below is Brisbane City Hall, home to the Museum of Brisbane and The Storytellers Exhibition. The exhibition will be on display until the 25th of April and I will be taking part in an ‘in-conversation’ event late that month to talk about stories and writing and the incredible power of place. More details to come via my EVENTS PAGE, MAILING LIST and SOCIAL MEDIA.

Update: A New Short Story2021-02-07T21:14:17+00:00

Thought: Annie Wheeler, Anzacs, and Archivists

Last year I was thrilled to visit the State Library of Queensland, where the dedicated library archivists showed me some of their favourite treasures. This box of index cards belonged to Annie Wheeler, the widow of a Queensland grazier, who was in England when World War One broke out.

Determined to be of service, Annie Wheeler moved to accommodations near the AIF headquarters in London and set herself up as a conduit between Queensland families and their loved ones on the battlefields. She kept track of each soldier’s movements, forwarded mail, advanced allowances, offered care to the injured, and kept family at home informed. By 1918, she had 2,300 men on file and was sending fortnightly updates back to Australia for publication in the local newspapers.

I was captivated by Annie Wheeler and her meticulous index cards. She was known as the “Mother of the Queenslanders” and each card in her file bears witness to the journey of a much-loved son fighting in a brutal war a long, long way from home. I could well imagine the comfort it must have brought each family to know that their young man would not be lost or forgotten while Annie Wheeler was watching over him.

It wasn’t until we were about to pack the file box away that I thought to mention my great-grandfather, a boy from central Queensland who I’d been told had served as a signaller in WW1. It was like reaching back through time to find a small set of cards with his name on them: a young man who died in France without ever seeing or holding his baby daughter, my grandmother. But there he was. File notes written in the kind, careful pen of Annie Wheeler, including, in red ink, the saddest of them all.

As I held the cards in my hand, a long-ago forebear who had to that point been something of an abstraction for me was made real. He had lived. As a young man he had travelled across the ocean to fight a terrible war in a distant country from which he would never return; but he had lived and his journey mattered.

On this day of reflection, I have thought about how much we owe to Annie Wheeler, the archivists of our museums and libraries, and record-keepers everywhere for helping us in our duty of remembrance; lest we forget.

Thought: Annie Wheeler, Anzacs, and Archivists2020-05-04T02:04:11+01:00

Thought: Rhapsody on an Autumn Night

One of my favourite poems is Rhapsody on a Windy Night, by T.S. Eliot. I learned it by heart when I was eighteen years old and preparing for my Speech & Drama Licenciate exam with my old friend and teacher, Herbert Davies. It’s a bleak and haunting poem about time and its passage, in which the speaker walks along a moonlit street at midnight, each streetlamp revealing striking images in the present that recall memory fragments from his past.

I’m not sure whether I loved the poem back then because I was already fascinated by themes of past and present, or whether the poem played a role in sparking my interest, but whatever the case, as I walked along the street last night, and the streetlamp hummed with silvery light, I found myself remembering the lines of Rhapsody, and my old friend, Herbert, and his drama studio on Tamborine, and his dog named Jess, and his long thin fingers, and his cigarettes that always fell to ash before he finished smoking them, and the way he laughed, and the stories he told, and what it was like to be eighteen years old and discovering poetry and language; and I fell to thinking about the ever-growing space between now and then and all the things that have happened in between.

And even as I experienced a swell of melancholy, I also felt a spark of awe at the power and comfort of poetry: that twenty-five years after I first encountered Eliot’s words (and more than one hundred years after he wrote them) they could still come to me like an old friend on a cold and windy night in London in October 2019.

*

(I’ve written more about Herbert and the part he played in my reading life here.)

Thought: Rhapsody on an Autumn Night2020-02-12T09:36:40+00:00

Update: New UK and US paperback jackets | TCD

The Clockmaker’s Daughter will be released in paperback in both the UK and the US this spring, sporting an all new jacket in each place. In the UK, the paperback edition will hit shelves on the 18th of April, while in the US copies will be available a little over month later on the 21st of May. There are also bonus features aplenty: the UK edition contains a letter to readers and a brand new afterword; while the US edition includes a handy Chronology of Birchwood Manor and a Book Club Reader’s Guide.

Finally, a reminder as to what it’s all about…

 

Update: New UK and US paperback jackets | TCD2019-03-27T18:55:13+00:00

The B&N Podcast: The Allure of the Past

When I was in NYC for The Clockmaker’s Daughter book tour, I had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Tipper for the Barnes & Noble podcast. We chatted about the allure of the past, layers of time, crumbling old buildings, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the process of writing. Make yourself a hot cup of tea and pull up a chair . . .

The B&N Podcast: The Allure of the Past2020-05-27T16:21:02+01:00

Video: My Life in Books

Long before I was a writer, I was a reader. My parents taught me how and, from the moment I discovered that wonderful other worlds lived within the black marks on white pages, I was hooked. The older I get, the more aware I am that childhood reading – indeed, all reading – is a type of landscape every bit as shaping as the geographical landscape outside the window. Herewith – my life in books!

Video: My Life in Books2019-03-23T18:20:27+00:00
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