The character of Nora is likely the person I felt I got to know the best, although we don’t truly get her perspective – we only hear from her as she’s being written through the interpretation of a fictional writer who pops up about halfway through the book. And because it’s a mystery to solve that happened so long ago, suspicion is cast amongst many different people I suspected almost every single person of terrible things at one point or another in this book. In fact, I would argue the character development was somewhat uneven in this book I never felt very connected to Jess, arguably the protagonist of the book. Upon retrospection, its the plotting that kept me reading this book, more than the characters. Jess is eager to understand why Nora was so intent on climbing up some rickety old steps to a room full of dusty old things, and how she can piece together an old family tragedy that seems to be coming back to haunt them decades later. Nora’s caregivers confirm that she was very agitated in the days leading up to her fall, acting strangely when some strange correspondence from a solicitor up north arrived. When Jess returns home to Sydney Australia, she discovers her grandmother fell when climbing the stairs to her attic, a place previously forbidden to Jess as a child.

Fast forward to December 2018 in London, struggling journalist Jess receives a phone call that her beloved grandmother Nora has fallen down and hurt herself, so Jess rushes home to be with her as she recuperates in the hospital in Australia. Tragedy strikes, and no one in that small town is ever the same again.

Her sister-in-law Nora is visiting for the holidays, heavily pregnant, who decides to stay home from the picnic. Her husband is travelling abroad again, and she’s struggling to be the doting mother she’s expected to be for her four children, including her youngest, only 6 weeks old. It’s Christmas Eve, 1959 in a small town in Australia, a scorching hot day, and Isabel wants to get her large family out of the house for a picnic. It’s one of those historical books that switches back and forth from the present day to the past, building suspense simply by delaying the ‘what happened that day’ as much as possible, but what makes this plot even more intricate are the various subplots and people that are combined to create a fulsome picture. Some people love the prospect of digging into a giant family saga such as this, but I was hesitant about the length. A great big doorstop of a book, Homecoming by Kate Morton was a work of historical fiction I had to prepare myself for.

Homecoming book kate morton