The Homemade God

Family is everything, even when it falls apart.

Discover the escapist new Sunday Times bestselling novel from the multi-million-copy bestselling author of Miss Benson’s Beetle and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.


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.

Although 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 happens when they splinter, and what it would take to mend them.

Review

‘The most moving, beautiful and brilliant book I’ve read in a long time.’ - Claire Pooley, author of How to Age Disgracefully

‘A triumph of insight and empathy!’ - Clare Chambers, author of?Small Pleasures

'Sharp, absorbing, emotionally intelligent' - Guardian

'Deeply satisfying' – Observer

’A highly compelling mystery and a tender, brilliantly drawn exploration of sibling dynamics. I couldn't put it down.' - India Knight, author of Darling

'Joyce is a fearless explorer of emotional landscape.' –Sunday Times

'If only there were more novelists like Rachel Joyce' –Telegraph

‘Joyce writes with her trademark vitality and … I couldn’t put it down.’ - Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky and Mr Mac and Me

'Lyrical, shrewd and, ultimately, as indecently satisfying as a four course Italian lunch. 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

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.