Mantle swoops for Morton's 'stunning' novel as rights snapped up around world

Mantle has swooped for Kate Morton’s "stunning" new novel, Homecoming, amid a flurry of rights deals around the world. 

Publisher Maria Rejt acquired UK publishing rights from Lizzy Kremer at David Higham Associates. US rights have been sold by Kremer to Mariner Books and Canadian rights to Simon & Schuster, with Allen & Unwin publishing Morton in Australia and New Zealand. Catalan, Spanish, French, German, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish rights have also been sold. The novel will be published as Mantle’s superlead title on 13th April 2023. 

The publisher wrote: "Homecoming opens on New Year’s Day 1959 in the grounds of a grand and mysterious house nestled deep in the Adelaide Hills and what is discovered there will reverberate down the decades and tear the local community apart. When, nearly 60 years later, a journalist is called back home from London to visit her ailing grandmother, a secret is finally let slip and the door into the grand house’s mysterious world opens again." 

"This is Kate at the peak of her storytelling powers. Homecoming is a stunning and intricate novel that spans generations and continents," said Rejt. "Immersive, heartbreaking and beautifully told, it explores the bonds of family, how we can hurt those we love the most with secrets left untold, and the joy and pain of finally coming home."

Morton said: "I started Homecoming in the middle of 2020; having left London to be near family in South Australia, and as many things known about the world seemed to become unknown overnight, I began to think a lot about home and belonging and family, and especially what it means to ‘come home’. This book has been a home of sorts for me over the past two years—a place to disappear into: my favourite experience, as both a reader and a writer—and now, at last, it is time to invite my readers in too.

"Homecoming will feel familiar to my regular readers because it’s filled with secrets and mysteries, the haunting of the present by the past, by mothers, daughters, stories, storytellers, and a big old house on a hill. But in this book, along with a London setting—because, of course, London is the city of my heart—I’ve also brought my readers somewhere new and that is the Adelaide Hills, one of the most beautiful, haunting and glorious parts of Australia.”