SAVING GRACE

This literary star has followed her passion to the UK but she still longs to return to her Australian home

The Tasmanian Conservation Trust is still fighting for the environment, despite losing critical funding

It seems the world adores a fat Kate Morton book. The Australian author has sold more than 10 million books in 43 countries, each tome three times the length of most novels. She writes popular historical fiction: old-fashioned pageturners about mysterious houses, long-held secrets, foundlings — think Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca crossed with Dickens at his ripping-yarn Victorian best. First there was The House At Riv

erton (published in the UK and the US as The Shifting Fog), which immediately became a New York Times bestseller. The

Shifting Fog went on to win No. 1 spot on the UK’s Sunday Times Bestsellers chart. At home, it won the 2007 Australian Book Industry Award.

Morton, 42, also happens to be breathtakingly beautiful, which makes her life appear superlatively blessed. A journalist from Spain’s El País newspaper fell over himself trying to describe her: “… thin with milky skin, smooth chestnut hair with golden highlights and a fringe that is repositioned all the time with a single finger … perfect mouth and a direct look that addresses you frankly”.

She also has a handsome musician husband, Davin Patterson — who she’s mad about, and who is mad about her — and three adorable sons. She’s like some enchanted princess showered with impossibly good fortune.

Except for the fact that Morton is currently being sued by her former literary agent Selwa Anthony, over an alleged breach of contract and she is awaiting a decision on the case. At the same time, Morton is countersuing Anthony for allegedly failing to act in her best interests.

The first of three daughters born to civil engineer Warren Morton and then-wife Diane, Morton describes herself as a “classic firstborn”. “I tick all the boxes,” she says. Little Kate was studious, well-behaved, “that sort of person” who does everything she is expected to do.

Because of her father’s work, the family moved between South Australia, NSW and Queensland, finally settling on Tamborine Mountain in the Gold Coast hinterland when Morton was five.

She went to small local state schools before attending prestigious Somerset College at Mudgeeraba.

The three Morton sisters — Kate, artist Jenny, 39, and bestselling Mills & Boon author Julia, 36, who writes under a pseudonym — were romantic girls, given to dreaming. Julia imagined the three of them were like the Bronte sisters, without their early deaths.

That sense of romance continued for Morton when she met Patterson at a gig where he was playing when she was 18 and he was studying jazz piano at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music.

“He’s a very, very special human, my greatest gift,” she says. “I feel blessed in many ways but especially about him. He came into my family when I was 18 and he became like one of the children of our family. My sisters, everyone adores him.”

In other creative partnerships there is often tension when one half of a couple achieves more success than the other, but not so in their marriage. “We’ve been together 24 years, we’re best friends, [jealousy] has never been an issue,” she says.

Morton has written about how their early life together was often hand-to-mouth. Now their three children (Oliver, 15, Louis, 10, and Henry, 4) are at a posh independent school near their rented home in North London.

The family is into the third year of their five-year visa. Morton says she knew they needed to be near open space, which is why they chose an area close to Hampstead Heath. “They’re Australian kids, used to getting out on their bikes, running around and being noisy. I think they’re the three noisiest children in London,” she says.

The family intends to move back to Australia. “I love London, but I also love Brisbane as well, it’s not a comparative thing. Among other things, our extended family is (in Australia), but at the moment being in the UK is really useful for research and a great opportunity that I’m glad to have, so we’re on something of a family adventure.”

Morton’s new novel is firmly based in England and is possibly her most “English” novel yet. It features characters with names straight out of Dickens (“Pale Joe” might have wandered in from

David Copperfield), and ranges from Victorian England to the Blitz of World War II and modern-day London.

The book was inspired by Morton’s love of London; she finds the city “invigorating”. “The very streets are resources for books like mine, and to have the level of resources, the British Library, the London Library, is just incredible,” she says. “Obviously the big museums inspire me but it’s not just the big ones; the little ones, the niche museums, are amazing too. The Dickens Mu- seum! To be able to walk into the actual house where Dickens lived is extraordinary.”

But Morton’s true subject is time: its effects on character, and on the way the present vanishes into an unrecoverable past. She inherited her Anglophile mother’s love of antiques so that anything old — jewellery, houses, clothing — sets Morton’s imagination alight. As a child she spent a lot of time with her mother snooping around old shops and second-hand book stores.

Now Morton wants nothing more than to keep writing books. She seeks to inspire in her readers the same sort of feeling she got as a child, falling down the rabbit hole into the wonder of a book. She’s not on Twitter, and her Instagram account is filled with photographs of letterboxes or old houses or a fallingdown iron gate.

“Oh yeah, I’m a girl out of time in that respect,” she says, laughing. Her millions of readers love her for it.