

More than being a writer, being a storyteller means you want to tell it to somebody. In a very literal sense, it means that there are readers waiting to read the next book, which is brilliant, and what every storyteller hopes for. It’s wonderful and amazing, but it gives a different perspective, I suppose. I was very inexperienced when I had the name “bestseller” attached to mine, so it’s not something I have worked toward in the usual way. My Australian publishers took and sold it in rights deals before I had even sold the first copy. My trajectory was unusual, in that I had a lucky break with the right manuscript at the right time. What’s your relationship to the idea of being a bestselling author? Is it a meaningful marker of success, for example? The Globe spoke to Morton about her writing process, where she finds her ideas and why she is so fascinated by family secrets. This out-of-character behaviour – Jess was forbidden to go up there as a child – leads her down an investigative rabbit hole that takes her 50 years into the past, and straight into the midst of a family secret: Her aunt and three cousins, all found dead by the side of a riverbank on Christmas Eve in 1959.īeing a Kate Morton novel, of course, this revelation is only just the beginning of a slow untwisting of half-truths and lies knotted together, teased apart over the course of more than 500 pages that fly by as if they’re 50. It’s classic Kate Morton: Adrift after the breakdown of her relationship in London, a fortysomething journalist named Jess is suddenly called back home to Australia when her beloved grandmother has a fall while searching for something in the attic. In fact, her newest, Homecoming, is on the bestseller list as we speak, sitting in the top spot on the Globe’s paperback fiction list.

The author of seven historical fiction novels – each a deeply pleasurable blend of mystery and family entanglements, always anchored in a vivid sense of place – she’s a consistent presence on bestseller lists, including The Globe and Mail’s own fiction charts. "You've gotta read this": The books Globe staffers are loving this weekīy that logic, then, there should be untold millions of unique versions of Morton’s characters floating around in imaginations across the world.
