About

The Homemade God follows the sudden death of a renowned artist and his four adult children as they travel to Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy during a heatwave to sort out his affairs with his much-younger wife. With sparkling wit, compassion and tender insight, The Homemade God explores memory, identity, grief, healing, and the bonds of siblinghood.

Rachel Joyce is the author of the Booker Prize longlisted novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, as well as Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, The Music Shop, Miss Benson's Beetle to name a few. The film of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, starring Jim Broadbent, was released in 2023.

Rachel will be in conversation with Jennie Godfrey, author of the Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, and Mr B's fave, The List of Suspicious Things.

About the book:

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

'It made me laugh, it made me cry and I couldn't put it down. If you are a fan of Maggie O'Farrell you must read this.' – Louise Minchin.

'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.

'Rachel Joyce is a masterful storyteller.' – Sarah Winman.