The Homemade God: A devastating, deeply compassionate family drama from the prize-winning author, for readers of Ann Patchett and Maggie O’Farrell
About this ebook
'Lyrical, shrewd and, ultimately, as indecently satisfying as a four course Italian lunch, The Homemade God tells of four siblings surviving an artist father whose 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
Sparkling and addictive ... Rachel Joyce is so incredibly good and wise on families and siblings. I couldn’t love it more.' - Harriet Evans, author of The Garden of Lost and Found
‘This terrific novel absolutely refuses to be cosy and provides all sorts of misdirections and a sense of foreboding throughout. A triumph of insight and empathy!’ - Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
'Rachel Joyce is a masterful storyteller.' - Sarah Winman, Sunday Times bestselling author of Still Life
'Joyce is a fearless explorer of emotional landscape.' – Sunday Times
'If only there were more novelists like Rachel Joyce' – Telegraph
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.
About the author
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.
