Literary superstar has a new book coming soon

Best-selling Brisbane author Kate Morton has revealed the release date of her new mystery Homecoming, her first book since 2018.

It’s called Homecoming but Kate Morton’s next book is as highly anticipated as the Second Coming. Her fans are always desperate for a new novel and it has been that way since the Brisbane author hit the headlines in 2007 with her first bestseller The Shifting Fog, also published as The House at Riverton. Her last book, The Clockmaker’s Daughter was published in 2018 and her sales now top 16 million books.

Her 2013 book The Secret Keeper won The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year award that year.

And here’s the really good news – her publisher, Allen & Unwin, has exclusively revealed that her next, Homecoming, will be out in April 2023.

Kate Morton’s hotly anticipated new novel will be out in April 2023

The author, a graduate of the University of Queensland, who is now in her mid forties, divides her time between Brisbane and Adelaide having moved back to Australia from England with her husband (jazz musician and composer Davin Patterson) and three boys when the pandemic hit. So it seems only fair that her new book is called Homecoming.

“I started Homecoming in the middle of 2020 having left London to be near family in South Australia,” Morton says. “And as many things known about the world seemed to become unknown overnight, I began to think a lot about home and belonging and family, and especially what it means to come home. This book has been a home of sorts for me over the past two years.

“Homecoming will feel familiar to my regular readers, because it’s filled with secrets and mysteries, the haunting of the present by the past, by mothers, daughters, stories, storytellers, and a big old house on a hill. But in this book, along with a London setting, I’ve also brought my readers somewhere new, and that is the Adelaide Hills, one of the most beautiful, haunting and glorious parts of Australia.”

Kate Morton in London. Photo by Davin Patterson

England is a familiar setting in her books but Australian settings have crept in. The Forgotten Garden has a storyline set in Brisbane and there’s a bit of Tamborine Mountain, where her father still lives and where she once lived, in The Secret Keeper. When The Courier-Mail interviewed the author last year she hinted that a leafy suburb of Brisbane might also appear in the next book as well as the Adelaide Hills.

Allen & Unwin CEO Robert Gorman describes Morton as “extraordinary, worldwide publishing phenomenon” and says she is “writing at the height of her powers”. Her publisher, Annette Barlow says she is a publishing phenomenon.

“With sales of over 16 million copies around the world sold in 38 languages, Kate Morton’s career is inspirational,” Barlow says.

“Each of her books has held readers enthralled, and Homecoming is her best work yet. It’s a magnificent novel, full of mysteries, long-hidden secrets and a search for belonging. I can’t wait to share this book.”

The book that started a stellar career

Barlow says it will be most highly anticipated book of 2023, an epic novel that spans generations. Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, and how we guard the lies we tell. It explores the power of motherhood, the corrosive effects of tightly held secrets, and the healing nature of truth. Above all, it is a beguiling and immensely satisfying novel from one of the finest writers working today. It begins in the Adelaide Hills, on Christmas Eve, 1959. At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand and mysterious mansion, a local delivery man makes a terrible discovery. A police investigation ensues, and a small town becomes embroiled in one of the most shocking and perplexing murder cases in the history of South Australia.

The author herself is a very private person but found herself in the spotlight and in court in 2018 when her former agent, Selwa Anthony, sued Morton over a disagreement over money after Morton sacked her. It was a case that backfired with Anthony ultimately ordered to pay Morton more than half a million dollars. It was an unwanted distraction for the author who plunged straight back into writing another book. Her fans are happy she did.

allenandunwin.com