Homemade God

Anne's Review

Rachel Joyce’s The Homemade God is a novel of quiet devastations and the fragile, often contradictory nature of familial love. Set against the shimmering, oppressive heat of an Italian summer, the novel unfolds with the slow, deliberate pace of memory itself—layered, elusive, and sometimes unreliable.

At its heart, this is a story about the aftershocks of grief and the intricate choreography of sibling relationships. Joyce, with her characteristic empathy and psychological acuity, introduces us to the Kemp siblings—Netta, Susan, Goose, and Iris—each shaped by the gravitational pull of their father, Vic Kemp, a celebrated artist whose charisma and emotional negligence have left indelible marks. His sudden death, and the mystery surrounding his final painting and will, becomes the catalyst for a reckoning long deferred.

Joyce’s prose is deceptively simple, often lyrical, and suffused with a gentle irony. She captures the textures of domestic life and the unspoken tensions between siblings with a precision that recalls the best of literary realism. There are echoes here of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler, but also something distinctly Joyce’s own: a belief in the redemptive power of storytelling, even when resolution remains just out of reach.

The novel’s title, The Homemade God, is a poignant metaphor for the ways we mythologize our parents—imbuing them with divinity, only to discover their all-too-human flaws. Bella-Mae, the enigmatic young widow, is not merely a disruptor but a mirror, reflecting the siblings’ own desires, fears, and failures. Joyce resists easy moral binaries; instead, she invites us to sit with discomfort, to listen to the silences between words.

What makes this novel particularly affecting is its refusal to offer closure. The siblings do not emerge healed or united, but altered—perhaps more honest, more aware of the stories they’ve told themselves. In this way, Joyce honours the complexity of grief and the slow, often painful work of understanding.

The Homemade God is a tender, intelligent meditation on art, memory, and the bonds that both bind and break us. It is a novel that lingers, like the heat of that Italian summer, long after the final page.

Publisher's Review 

Set against the wild backdrop of an intense heatwave in Europe, this is a story about sibling relationships - what holds a family together and what might fracture it forever.

Family is everything, even when it falls apart.

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.