The Homemade God

(Paperback)

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Description

Critically acclaimed story about sibling relationships - what holds a family together and what might fracture it forever. A successful gear change from this bestselling author, set against the wild backdrop of an intense heatwave in Europe. Family is everything, even when it falls apart. There is a heatwave across Europe. Goose and his three sisters gather at the family's house by Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy. Their father, a famous artist, has recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead and there is no sign of a painting. Alhough the siblings have always been close, as they search for answers over that summer, the things they learn - about themselves, their father and their new stepmother - will drive them apart before they can come to any kind of understanding of what their father's legacy truly is. Extraordinarily compelling, at heart this is a novel about sibling relationships and those hairline cracks that can appear within a family- what what happens when they splinter, and what it would take to mend them.

Reviews

THE BEST BOOKS OF 2025 SO FAR: Rachel Joyce has become known as an author of quiet, often older, lives.
In The Homemade God, she changes track and it works.

-- Robbie Millen * Sunday Times *
The mysterious death of an artist causes havoc among siblings in a novel that astutely observes family dynamics ... Joyce is also exceptionally good at blending the big stuff of life with the small ... a sharp, absorbing and emotionally intelligent novel. -- Joanna Quinn * Guardian *
A masterly and deeply satisfying exploration of art, grief and familial bonds. -- Hannah Beckerman * Observer *
Compulsive and darkly funny, Joyces books are a must-read for me and this did not disappoint. -- Sarra Manning * Red Magazine *
Woman's Weekly LOVES The Homemade God: As the simple story of a family falling apart unfolds, written in Joyces inimitable style, we ask whether some wounds are just too deep to heal. -- Zoe West * Woman's Weekly *
The Homemade God shares the characteristic generosity of Joyce's seven previous novels but there's something darker at play. -- Erica Wagner * Harper's Bazaar *
Sparkling and addictive Rachel Joyce is so incredibly good and wise on families and siblings, pacing out a storys secrets so that you have to read one more page. [Its My Cousin Rachel meets The Enchanted April.] I couldnt love it more. -- Harriet Evans, author of The Stargazers and The Garden of Lost and Found
The Homemade God is an enthralling, thought-provoking, layered novel, seamed with a delicious dark humour. And, as in all the best redemptive stories, through the rubble of grief glimmers hope, acceptance and love. Truly wonderful. -- Sarah Winman, author of Still Life
Lyrical, shrewd and, ultimately, as indecently satisfying as a four course Italian lunch, The Homemade God tells of four siblings surviving an artist father none can admit is a talentless monster and how the fallout of his death obliges each to shatter and rebuild their life. My life is a little emptier now it's over. -- Patrick Gale, author of A Place Called Winter

A new novel by Rachel Joyce is always a cause for celebration and this was no exception.
I have always found something dark in her fiction and I feel this has been played down by reviewers at the expense of the warmth and healing that is also part of her great appeal. This terrific novel absolutely refused to be cosy and provided all sorts of misdirections and a sense of foreboding throughout. At first I could hear echoes of My Cousin Rachel and feel my anxieties and sympathies being expertly manipulated as I tried to work out who I was rooting for, but it was so much more subtle than that - none of the characters are wholly good or bad or dislikeable, because Rachel always shows us why they behave as they do. The missing picture was a neat image of the siblings' struggles to see their childhood with any kind of clarity.
Another triumph of insight and empathy!

-- Clare Chambers

Author Bio

Rachel Joyce is the author of the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North, The Music Shop, Miss Benson's Beetle, and a collection of interlinked short stories, A Snow Garden & Other Stories. Rachel's books have been translated into thirty-seven languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The critically acclaimed film of the novel, for which Rachel also wrote the screenplay, was released in 2023. Miss Benson's Beetle won the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize in 2021. Rachel was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year in December 2012 and was shortlisted for the UK Author of the Year in 2014. In 2024 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Kingston University. Rachel has written over twenty original afternoon plays and adaptations of the classics for BBC Radio 4. She lives with her family near Stroud.