The 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.