Kate Morton | April Author Spotlight

Summer 1924: On the eve of a glittering Society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again.

Winter 1999: Grace Bradley, 98, one-time house-maid of Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet's suicide. Ghosts awaken and memories, long consigned to the dark reaches of Grace's mind, begin to sneak back through the cracks. A shocking secret threatens to emerge; something history has forgotten but Grace never could.

Set as the war-shattered Edwardian summer surrenders to the decadent twenties, The Shifting Fog is a thrilling mystery and a compelling love story.

Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long-lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent, Edie begins to suspect that her mother's emotional distance masks an old secret.

As a thirteen-year-old World War Two evacuee, Edie's mother was chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe, and taken to live at Milderhurst Castle with the Blythe family: Juniper, her twin sisters and their father, Raymond, author of the 1918 children's classic The True History of the Mud Man. In the grand and glorious Milderhurst Castle, a new world opened up for Edie's mother. She discovered the joys of books and fantasy and writing, but also, ultimately, their dangers.

Fifty years later, as Edie chases the answers to her mother's riddle, she, too, is drawn to Milderhurst Castle and the eccentric Sisters Blythe. Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother's past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Milderhurst Castle, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected.

In 1930, at her twenty-first birthday party, Nell O'Connor learns the devastating story of an abandoned little girl, found alone on a passenger ship bound for Australia on the eve of the First World War.

Forty-five years later, she embarks upon a search for the truth that leads her to the windswept Cornish coast and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor.

Nell's grand-daughter, Cassandra, thought she knew her grandmother well, but when Nell dies in 2005, Cassandra comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold, and it is here that Cassandra will finally uncover the truth about the century-old mystery of a little girl lost.

The morning after the Edevane's exclusive Midsummer Eve party in Cornwall in 1933, their youngest child, Theo, is nowhere to be found. After months of futile searching, the family pack up and leave their beautiful country home, never to return. Until, in 2003, a young female police officer stumbles into the lost gardens surrounding the abandoned house and determines to find out what happened.

With a mystery that's become deeply personal to Sadie, and a novelist who is intent on hiding the past, can the secrets of that night ever be solved?

'A deliciously compelling mystery.' - Liane Moriarty, bestselling author of Big Little Lies

1961: On a sweltering summer's day, while her family picnics by the stream on their Suffolk farm, sixteen-year-old Laurel hides out in her childhood tree house, dreaming of a boy called Billy, a move to London, and the bright future she can't wait to seize. But before the idyllic afternoon is over, Laurel will have witnessed a shocking crime that changes everything.

2011: Now a much-loved actress, Laurel finds herself overwhelmed by shades of the past. Haunted by memories, and the mystery of what she saw that day, she returns to her family home and begins to piece together a secret history. A tale of three strangers from vastly different worlds - Dorothy, Vivien and Jimmy - who are brought together by chance in wartime London and whose lives become fiercely and fatefully entwined.

Shifting between the 1930s, the 1960s and the present, The Secret Keeper is a spellbinding story of mysteries and secrets, theatre and thievery, murder and enduring love.

Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959.

At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery. Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia.

An epic story that spans generations, Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, how we protect the lies we tell, and what it means to come home. Above all, it is an intricate and spellbinding novel from one of the finest writers working today.