Author(s): Rachel Joyce

Fiction

Family is everything, even when it falls apart: discover the brand-new novel from the multi-million-copy bestselling author. Perfect for fans of Ann Patchett and Maggie O'Farrell. 

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.

'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