'The Homecoming' by Zoë Apostolides messed up with my mind like no other book. I've read several haunting tales before but never have I been so startled by the discovery of the fulcrum of the narrative. Almost 80% of the story went on in such a lumbering sort of way that on several occasions I wished things would speed up a little. But now on retrospection, I see what a brilliant tactic it was on the part of the author to ultimately thrust you into the tumbling gyre of secrets and mystery once the layers around them started unraveling.

Ellen is a ghost-writer who has been sent to Elver House to record the past memories of Catherine Carey and ultimately write a memoir on her behalf. When she arrives on the estate, everything is a haze and honestly, I'd run for my life on the very first walk to the manor if I was her. But then I guess that's why I'm not the protagonist of the novel and she is.

Initially I wanted to know so much more, to see more, but towards the end I sort of leaned into the acceptance and understanding that this is exactly how life is. Not every secret is unearthed, not every question in answered. There're things beyond our comprehension that are as much a part of this world as us, and the only thing we can do is lay a hand gently on their presence, and keep living alongside them.

The novel is about a lot of things, but mostly it's about how hauntingly tender memories and love can be. It's about spindly, liberating, intertwining female friendships that span generations, and the loneliness that can grip you both at the centre of a hustling and bustling city and a deserted, dilapidated manor house. It's about eels and hunger and freedom, and the obfuscation and associated vulnerability that comes with age, especially in the case of women. But mostly it's about learning to care about the humans that we come in contact with, even when our stays in their life's journey might be only for a moment or so.

In the end we all become stories, and may be we write because every story deserves to be heard. I genuinely wish I could give a tight hug to Catherine.

Ellen’s had many assignments before as a ghost writer, but none as strange as Elver House. She arrives amidst a storm, locals reluctant to speak of the house and its caretaker, Catherine Carey. The house itself is beautiful, in a sort of ramshackle way, fallen to disrepair over the years as its caretaker has grown older. As Ellen conducts her interviews of Miss Carey, her life, and the house, she gets more involved than she expects.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this one when I started reading it. It has a bit of a lot of things in it: part memoir (on behalf of Miss Carey), part mystery, and a dive into women’s roles in society. I figured out the plot line pretty early on, and spent the majority of the book waiting for Ellen to catch up to me. It is a slow burn, but wraps up pretty neatly by the end.

Recommended if you like: slow burn mysteries, ghost stories

A slow burn gothic setting in the style of M. Night Shyamalan. The setting is claustrophobic, forbidding, with an ever growing sense of wrongness. I mistakenly believed that the pace of this book was slow, only to realize that the plot was coiling around me the entire time.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for this ARC, this is one I will be thinking about for a while.