Zibby Mag

Book jacket biographies don’t tell us nearly enough about the authors we love. That’s why Zibby Mag launched the Author Snapshot, giving readers an inside look at the lives and work of our favorite writers.

This week we are featuring Kate Morton, the international bestselling author of six novels, including Homecoming, which just published April 4th. Read the spotlight to learn about Kate’s experience as a novelist, the inspiration behind the book, and more!

After having so many successful books come out, how does this book launch feel different and what are you most looking forward to?

This is the first novel that I’ve set almost entirely in my home country. When my family and I returned to Australia from London at the start of the pandemic, for what we thought would be a brief period, I was working on a book with a European setting and had a research trip organised for the following months. But, as the global situation evolved, and our plans changed, I found myself thinking a lot instead about home and belonging and what it means to come home.

Being on a remote farm in South Australia, after the bustle of London, while world events continued to spin faster, I kept landing on the T.S. Eliot line about ‘the still point of the turning world’. My immediate surroundings, the natural world, seemed brighter than usual, and clearer: the ancient gums on the ridge, the cockatoos in the walnut tree, the creek flowing through the paddock. I felt a distance stretch between myself and the manuscript I’d been working on, and I knew that I had to write instead about the place that I was in.

Of all my books, then, Homecoming draws most intimately on the landscape that inspired it, and it’s an absolute thrill, after a period of composition even more solitary than usual, finally to be able to share the novel, and the places that I know and love so well, with readers all around the world.

Where did you find the inspiration for Homecoming, and what kind of research did you conduct as you were writing the book?

Although the places within the novel were drawn largely from life, the historical setting required more traditional research. I wanted Tambilla and its residents to feel authentic and spent a lot of time exploring in person and reading about the first Lutheran settlers in South Australia and the establishment of various Adelaide Hills towns.

I also studied unsolved local crimes from the mid-twentieth century, including the infamous Somerton Body case. Much like Jess, my character in Homecoming, I searched the Trove collection and located every newspaper article relating to the mystery and its years-long investigation. The archival press coverage helped me to understand historical police procedure, but also to gain a sense of the language and attitudes of the time, along with various storytelling conventions useful for As If They Were Asleep—the old true crime novel that appears within Homecoming.

What was your writing process like for Homecoming, and did it differ from how you approached any of your previous books?

The writing process was not dissimilar from that for my previous novels. I always spend a great deal of time dreaming up the world of the story before I even think to sit down at my desk. Disparate ideas come together, faint at first, and then bolder, until I start to see snatches of scenes, hear exchanges between characters, feel the emotional echo of their predicaments. These I scribble down in my notebook, and my imaginings get bolder, gain clarity, building upon one another, so that eventually the book’s milieu—its colour, shape and feeling, along with the characters and main plot—is known to me.

That’s when I start to write, and I write every day, but not always at the same time, and I don’t keep office hours. Once the story is open in my mind, it’s there one hundred percent of the time and blends with the other strands of my life.

Despite my deep love of dreaming, I’m rigorous on the page. I edit scene by scene, printing what I’ve written, scribbling improvements at every line, typing them in, and then repeating until I’m satisfied enough to move on. It doesn’t make for a fast first draft, but I find that layering and adding texture along the way creates a verisimilitude that I crave and helps me to know my characters better.

What do you hope readers take away from Homecoming?

First and foremost, I seek to tell an engaging story about characters and places that feel real. But storytelling is about connecting, and I like to think that each time one of my books is read, no matter where, when, or by whom, there occurs a meeting of minds. It remains a great comfort and privilege to be able 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.’

What books do you recommend others read after they’ve finished Homecoming?

For books set between the present and the past, featuring families, secrets, and memorable old house, try Eve Chase’s Black Rabbit Hall and Hannah Richell’s The Shadow Year. For unputdownable domestic suspense, as funny as it is clever, anything by Sally Hepworth, whose latest is The Soulmate. For mysteries with Australian settings try Jane Harper (her latest, Exiles, is also set in the Adelaide Hills). And for poetry that explores the passing of time, I highly recommend T.S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and ‘Burnt Norton’.