The Homemade God

Family is everything, even when it falls apart. Discover the brand-new novel from the multi-million-copy bestselling author.

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.

'The renowned artist - the emotionally starved children - what an inspired subject! Joyce writes with her trademark vitality and compassion and there is such colour here. So much at stake. I couldn’t put it down.’ - Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky and Mr Mac and Me