A long lost letter arrives in the post and Edie Burchill finds herself on a journey to Milderhurst Castle, a great but moldering old house, where the Blythe spinsters live and where her mother was billeted 50 years before as a 13 year old child during WWII. The elder Blythe sisters are twins and have spent most of their lives looking after the third and youngest sister, Juniper, who hasn’t been the same since her fiance jilted her in 1941.
Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Milderhurst, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in ‘the distant hours’ of the past has been waiting a long time for someone to find it.
Morton once again enthralls readers with an atmospheric story featuring unforgettable characters beset by love and circumstance and haunted by memory, that reminds us of the rich power of storytelling.
Kate Morton is eldest of three sisters. She was born in South Australia and moved with her family numerous times before settling, finally, on Tamborine Mountain. There she attended a tiny country school and spent much of her childhood inventing and playing games of make-believe with her sisters.
Although she’d read and scribbled from before she could remember, it hadn’t occurred to Kate, until that time, that real books were written by real people. She began writing in earnest and completed two full-length manuscripts (which lie deep and determinedly within a bottom drawer) before settling finally into the story that would become The House at Riverton (The Shifting Fog). Meanwhile, Kate graduated from the University of Queensland with First Class Honours in English Literature and took up a scholarship to complete a Masters focusing on tragedy in Victorian literature.
The House at Riverton was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller in the UK in 2007 and a New York Times bestseller in 2008. The Shifting Fog won General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2007 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA), and The House at Riverton was nominated for Most Popular Book at the British Book Awards in 2008.
Her second book, The Forgotten Garden, was a #1 bestseller in Australia and Spain, and a Sunday Times #1 bestseller in the UK in 2008. It won General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2009 Australian Book Industry Awards and was an Amazon Best of the Month pick and a New York Times bestseller in 2009.
The Distant Hours was an international bestseller in 2010 and won General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2011 ABIAs.
The Secret Keeper debuted at #8 on the New York Times Bestseller List and has won a number of other awards and accolades including the 2013 ABIA for General Fiction Book of the Year and The Courier-Mail’s People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year.
Kate’s books are published in 38 countries and in 32 languages. She continues to write the sorts of books she can disappear inside.
* The website www.colibri.bg is optimized 
