FAMILY SECRETS
Homecoming by Kate Morton, A&U
Kate Morton’s epic seventh novel is not only a taut murder mystery but a tender love letter to her homeland. She wrote the story holed up with her family in South Australia during the pandemic, unable to return to their UK base. There she reconnected with the Australia of her youth and began pondering what it really means to ‘come home’. “Living near my extended family in the landscape of my childhood, I found myself thinking about home and belonging. Long, surreal days of quarantine on a sunlit farm in the Adelaide Hills, surrounded by the natural world, provided just the right conditions for such thoughts to coalesce around characters and a story,” she says.
And what a tale it is, opening in 1959 with the haunting scene of a mother and her children on a hot summer’s afternoon lying seemingly asleep – but actually dead – under the canopy of a willow tree. The family is discovered by a local man who was riding nearby on his horse. The group looked so serene, surrounded by the remnants of a picnic; John and Evie wrapped in towels after a swim in the creek, lying with their mother Isabel Turner, the wind ruffling the skirt of teenager Matilda and a baby’s crib hanging from a branch. But on closer inspection that dark stripe on Evie’s arm is a line
