Homecoming

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the source text’s treatment of death by suicide.

The very title of Morton’s novel, Homecoming, presents the concept of home as a central preoccupation for several characters. Although the title ostensibly refers to Jess’s return to Australia, it also concerns her inner journey toward a new understanding of what truly constitutes a home. Polly, her mother, also struggles to find belonging and a sense of home, and in the end, they find a homecoming of sorts by reconnecting with each other.

When the novel begins, Jess lives in London, far from Australia. Early in her time there, she stumbles upon the Charles Dickens Museum, and it becomes a touchstone for her “whenever [she feels] angry or sad or even just inexplicably unsettled” (30). For Jess, her loneliness is alleviated by reconnecting to Dickens, and therefore her childhood home, reminiscing about “[a] thousand childhood hours spent lying in her grandmother’s garden in Sydney, book in hand” (31). Literature therefore assuages her loneliness; however, this connection is more fragile than she realizes. When she finds out about Nora’s hospitalization and makes plans to return to Australia, her sense of London as home quickly shifts. As the

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