Homecoming

Homecoming is Kate Morton’s 2023 novel, her first new book in five years and a return to the dual timeline historical fiction that has built her career across novels like The Forgotten Garden, The House at Riverton, and The Lake House. The novel is set primarily in two periods. The Adelaide Hills of South Australia in 1959, where a young housekeeper named Nora arrives at the home of the wealthy Turner family on Christmas Eve and finds the children of the household dead and the mother missing. And contemporary London and Australia, where journalist Jess Turner returns to her grandmother’s bedside and discovers connections to the old crime that her family has spent decades not talking about.

Morton writes the kind of multigenerational mystery that requires patience but rewards it. The Adelaide Hills section reads almost like a separate novel, with its own pace and its own cast, before Morton starts weaving it together with the contemporary thread. Jess’s investigation into what really happened at the Turner family estate in 1959 unfolds at the deliberate pace of someone tracking small clues through old letters, court transcripts, and the slowly opening memories of an elderly grandmother who has been carrying her own version of the truth for sixty years.

The Australian setting is rendered with the kind of specificity that only an Australian writer who lives the place can produce. The summer heat, the particular quality of the light in the Adelaide Hills, the slow rhythms of small town life in the late fifties, all of it grounds the novel in a real geography. The crime at the center, while serious, is handled with the kind of restraint Morton has practiced for years.

For longtime Kate Morton fans, Homecoming is a welcome return after the wait. For new readers, it is a strong introduction to her work, though her earlier novels like The Forgotten Garden and The House at Riverton are also excellent starting points. The pacing is slow by thriller standards and exactly right for the historical mystery she is working in.