Review: Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

July Book of the Month: The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

Book Club Review (Jul 2026)

There are some books that give you plenty to talk about once you have finished them, and The Homemade God was definitely one of those. Rachel Joyce joined us in July to talk about the novel, which made an already fascinating book even more interesting as we were able to hear directly from her about the family, the setting and some of the ideas behind the story.

Set largely around the family's house beside Lake Orta in northern Italy, the novel follows Goose and his three sisters after the sudden death of their father, Vic, a famous artist who had recently married the much younger Bella-Mae. He had gone to Italy intending to complete his masterpiece, but after his death there is no painting to be found. As the siblings begin looking for answers, the version of their childhood and their father that they have carried with them starts to unravel.

Family relationships were easily one of the biggest talking points among our members. Rachel takes what initially appears to be a close group of siblings and gradually exposes all the little cracks underneath: old loyalties, childhood neglect, jealousy, grief and the different ways children can grow up in exactly the same family while experiencing it completely differently.

One member described the characters beautifully as being:

“sketched in charcoal to give an outline, however instilling the overall essence of their person.”

She particularly liked the way Rachel showed a family held together by things they had never properly acknowledged, and how it was only once everything began to fall apart that the siblings were able to start seeing themselves and each other more clearly.

The structure also divided opinion slightly. Several members enjoyed the way the story moved between characters and gradually revealed what had happened, while one felt that some sections were a little disjointed. Another enjoyed the novel and admired the way Rachel explored what happens behind closed doors in a family, but admitted that she never quite had that feeling of rushing back to pick the book up.

That mixture of reactions actually feels very fitting for The Homemade God. It is not a straightforward family drama. There is an uneasiness running underneath the beautiful Italian setting almost from the beginning, and the more we learn about Vic, Bella-Mae and the four siblings, the less certain everything becomes.

One member was completely captivated. She described it as the best book she had read to date and called it:

“an absolute firecracker of a novel about sibling relationships, fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, and what happens when hairline cracks begin to deepen and shatter within a family.”

She was hooked from the opening line and particularly loved the final section, Work of Art, which she felt brought everything together in a way that was messy, profound and deeply moving.

Art itself becomes a fascinating part of the novel. Vic has occupied such a huge space in his children's lives that the title The Homemade God begins to take on more meaning as the story develops. One of our members picked up specifically on the way Vic had effectively been made into the family's own god, and how difficult it was for his children to separate the man he really was from the version of him they had created.

One of the things that stayed with me most was the way the book showed that children growing up in the same family can have completely different experiences of the same parent. We often assume that because siblings lived in the same house, they must have experienced their childhood in broadly the same way, but that simply is not always true.

One child can have a warm, positive relationship with a parent while another experiences that same person as difficult, inappropriate or damaging. It can be particularly hard to understand someone else's experience when your own version of that parent was completely different.

I think The Homemade God deals with that beautifully. Vic is a very complex father and the novel gradually shows the difference between the family people see from the outside and what is actually happening inside it. Rachel writes about those differences without making the book relentlessly bleak. There is grief running through the story, particularly following the death of the siblings' mother, but it sits alongside humour, art, family history and the complicated ways people continue to love one another even when a family has not always functioned well.

The novel also asks some uncomfortable questions about grief and memory. How much of the person we mourn is the real person? How much is the story we have created about them? What happens when the things we believed about our childhood no longer quite hold together?

Rachel Joyce has written several bestselling novels, including The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The Music Shop and Miss Benson's Beetle. The Homemade God was first published in April 2025 and marked something of a darker turn in her writing, while still retaining her characteristic interest in family, grief, relationships and the possibility of healing.

Our members gave The Homemade God an average rating of 4.2 out of 5. Some absolutely loved it, while others found the pace or structure less compelling, but there was a strong appreciation for Rachel's writing and particularly for the complexity of the family she created.

Rachel's visit was also one of the highlights of the month. Our members were delighted to meet her and she was incredibly generous with both her time and her answers. She gave us a real insight into The Homemade God as well as some of her previous books, and it made for a genuinely lovely book club meeting.

A layered, intelligent family novel about grief, memory, sibling relationships and the very different versions of a family that can exist under one roof.

Rating: ⭐ 4.2 / 5