ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce is published by Doubleday and is out now. My thanks to Alison Barrow for the proof copy.

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.

The Homemade God is a character study of four siblings and their rose-tinted view of their father. Three sisters, Netta, Susan and Iris and their brother Goose have a sometimes complicated relationship with Vic Kemp, the famous artist, but they all utterly adore him. Things change when he meets a much younger woman, Bella-Mae, and he marries her, sweeping her off to the family villa on the shores of Lake Orta in Italy to paint the biggest and most important piece of his life. But then Vic dies and fractures appear in the siblings’ relationships with each other and with Bella-Mae.

The story is beautifully portrayed by Rachel Joyce who manages with great subtlety to steer the reader from one viewpoint to another until gradually the penny drops and the blinkers covering the characters’ eyes are removed and they all see the situation for what it really is. To say more would be to spoil but as the late Queen once said: “recollections may vary” and each sibling realises that all they believed is not necessarily either correct or the same as each other.

This is a complex story of family ties, of a sometimes difficult but always memorable childhood, of what it is to be the eldest, the youngest and the ones in the middle, of living in the shadow of the most capable, or being the one who has to hold it all together. In the centre of it all is a larger than life figure around whom their lives always revolved; without him, they are cast adrift.

The descriptions of the lake are vivid and I was transported to the villa. The characters are not always likeable but are truly fascinating. Whilst character-driven, the plot drew me in and placed me at the heart of the Kemp family. A different book from Joyce’s previous but the high quality of the writing is just the same. I enjoyed this intricate examination of a dysfunctional family which demonstrated that all is not always as it seems.

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 & 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. Rachel was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year in December 2012 and shortlisted for the UK Author of the Year 2014. In 2024 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Kingston University.

Rachel has also written over twenty original afternoon plays and adaptations of the classics for BBC Radio 4. She lives with her family in Gloucestershire, near Stroud.