Homecoming

The Homecoming is Zoë Apostolides’s debut novel. Quietly disturbing, it tells the story of Ellen, a young ghost-writer sent to record the memoirs of an elderly woman living in a remote Northumberland manor. Elver House is dilapidated, its faded beauty fading to ruin. The assignment seems simple enough. Ellen will spend a week conducting interviews at the wild and sprawling estate – far from the quaint country cottage she had imagined – before returning to London to write Miss Carey’s autobiography. She digs deeper into its history, its lore and mystique and its occupant`s increasingly bizarre behaviour. Clearly it isn`t just the past that`s haunting Miss Carey. And in unravelling the tangled threads of the older woman`s story, Ellen too must confront more about herself than she bargained for. Part mystery, part ghost story, this is a story about isolation, memory, spirits and secrets, intergenerational friendship and motherhood.