No one can tell a more vivid story or weave a more intricate mystery than Kate Morton, and she has truly outdone herself with Homecoming. It's 560 glorious pages long, and I don't think I've ever burned through so many pages so quickly.
It takes place across multiple generations and two different time periods, with a constant flow of new information being introduced. Just when you think you've figured it out, you turn to the next page and discover just how wrong you were.
There was one plot twist that I speculated all along, but that may have been done intentionally. I'd be curious to know if others spotted it as well (we can discuss that on Discord!).
"Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn't experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital. A young boy laid up in bed for a year because his legs refuse to work and a young girl on the other side of the globe, sent to boarding school because her parents both died, had led completely different lives - and yet, through a mutual love of reading, they had inhabited the same world."
On Christmas Eve in 1959, Percy Summers is making his way back from running errands atop his horse, Blaze. As he gets lost in thought along the ride, we learn a bit about his childhood. As a Polio survivor, he spent most of it in bed, and found escape through the pages of books. "Doesn't matter where your body's grounded," his mother had told him. "There's other ways to travel."
He decides to take her for a swim, and cuts through the property of Wentworth House to their favorite swimming hole.
He spots the Turners: Isabel, John, Matilda, and Evie, seemingly sleeping at the water's edge, with remnants from an afternoon picnic still visible. There's a wicker crib suspended from a nearby tree for the newest addition, baby Thea.
The scene is eerily still; the only sign of movement is a steady trail of ants crawling across the youngest daughter's body, and Percy realizes they're not sleeping at all.
In December of 2018, Jess Turner-Bridges is a writer in London, struggling to make ends meet and searching for her next big story. While awaiting a call back from an editor, she receives a different type of call, one that she's been dreading for years: her grandmother, Nora, has taken a bad fall and is in the hospital.
Jess and her mother, Polly, are mostly estranged, and Jess has no knowledge of her father. She was mostly raised by Nora at her home in Sydney, affectionately known as Darling House, before moving to London to pursue her writing career. She spent most of her life looking up to Nora, and knows she needs to get to her as soon as possible. So, she boards a plane and heads home for Darling House once again.
"Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of 'home' wasn't 'away,' it was 'lonely.' When someone said, 'I want to go home,' what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore."
Back in 1959, the investigation of the Turner's deaths is in full swing. Isabel's husband, Thomas Turner, is ruled out, as he was away on business at the time.
Most disturbingly, the hanging crib is empty: baby Thea is missing.
After answering a barrage of police questions, Percy is finally allowed to go home to spend Christmas with his wife and his own two kids, Kurt and Marcus. Kurt had been courting Matilda Turner, and took her death especially hard.
The local town of Tambilla comes together to search for baby Thea, but she is never found.
Jess arrives at Darling House to find that not much has changed, but the silence that comes with Nora's absence is deafening. Nora was sharp as a tack despite being almost ninety years old, so Jess is surprised to learn that she had seemed confused and disoriented in the weeks leading up to her fall.
According to her housekeeper, Mrs. Robinson, Nora had fallen from the attic stairs. Growing up, Jess was always forbidden from the attic. Nora had insisted that the stairs were unsafe, and she had no reason to go up there herself, either.
Nora's caretaker, Patrick, tells Jess that Nora had been acting strangely. Bringing up things from the past, which was uncharacteristic, then seeming to have no memory of what she had said. Recently, he had found her sitting in the garden, visibly upset, saying, "I'm not going to let him take my baby." When he tried to question her about this, Nora acted as though he was the one acting strange.
Patrick also mentions how secretive Nora had been acting. She had been reading a book that she clearly didn't want him to see, an old detective novel of some sort. Also, she had received a letter a week prior that seemed to really upset her. Patrick didn't read the letter, but he saw where it was from: a law firm in South Australia.
After visiting the hospital, Jess realizes Patrick and Mrs. Robinson weren't exaggerating. Nora is drifting in and out of consciousness, muttering things like, "the pages," "he's going to take her from me," and the only thing Jess was able to understand: "Halcyon."
Jess had heard of Halcyon during the funeral of Nora's brother, where she overheard a conversation between Nora and a man named Mr. Friedman. Upon being asked what would become of Halcyon, Nora replied, "I cannot bear to hear that name. Of course, it must be sold at once. He should have sold it himself years ago. It is nothing to me now but an awful, awful millstone."
Only ten years old at the time, Jess doesn't fully understand what she's heard. She asks Polly, who explains that Halcyon is a house that belonged to her uncle Thomas. Thomas lived far away in England, so Jess reasons that Halcyon must be in England, too. Polly doesn't bother correcting her.
However, alone for the first time in Darling House, curiosity gets the best of Jess. She hopes that if she can figure out what Nora was so upset about in the first place, she might know how to help.
She decides to do some research on Halcyon, and discovers the secret her family has kept from her: The Turner Tragedy of 1959. Halcyon, known by locals as Wentworth House until Thomas and Isabel Turner moved in, was located in Adelaide Hills, South Australia.
For the first time, Jess reads about the tragic deaths of her great aunt and cousins, which was eventually ruled as a murder-suicide at the hands of Isabel.
Uncle Thomas did, in fact, live in England, but only moved there after the loss of his family.
The book Nora had been reading was As If They Were Asleep by Daniel Miller, documenting the events and investigation of the Turner case.
From this point on, it's almost like reading a book within a book, as we're taken through As If They Were Asleep for the first time alongside Jess, while also following the investigation in 1959 and how the lives of those in Tambilla were altered forever.
Pay close attention, because everything is not as it seems.
Did Isabel really kill herself and three of her children? If not, who did? What happened to Thea? Why did Nora hide all of this from Jess? What could she have been doing in the attic?
Set in the picturesque Australian countryside, this is a tale of family secrets, how far people will go to protect those they love, and surprisingly, the power of reading.
Through the pages of Daniel Miller's book, Jess is able to travel back in time to Tambilla, walk the grounds of Halcyon, and finally meet the family members who had been kept from her for most of her life.
"But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, giant forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like 'hedgerow' and 'conker,' and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate 'pudding' and 'blancmange.' And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved."