Join us for an afternoon with the number one bestselling, award-winning author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, as she talks about her new novel, The Homemade God, with Becky Hunter at The Odney Club, Cookham. Tickets include a glass of Prosecco and a cake. There will be an opprtunity to buy a discounted copy of The Homemade God and to meet Rachel Joyce to get your book signed after the talk.
A brilliantly realised gear-change, this big new book from Rachel Joyce examines the thinly veiled tension of family, of sibling relationships, of envy and jealousy, of fragility and misunderstandings.
Family is everything, even when it falls apart:
World-famous artist Vic Kemp has relied on his children to run his life ever since their mother died when they were young. When he summons the four of them to dinner with the promise of good news, the siblings expect him to tell them he has finished the masterpiece that will be the capstone to his career. Instead, he announces that he’s remarrying. His bride-to-be, Bella-Mae, is beautiful, a fellow artist – and fifty years his junior. When they object, Vic decamps with Bella-Mae to his summer home in Italy. Six weeks later, he is dead.
Netta, Susan, Goose and Iris gather at the house on Lake Orta to piece together what has happened, locate their father’s will, and bring his body and final painting home. Instead, they find themselves spending the summer under the same roof as Bella-Mae, forced to confront the various wounds they have incurred at the hands of their father and each other. How long can their family bonds hold? And is Bella-Mae the force that will destroy the family or set each of them free?
With wit, insight and compassion Rachel Joyce explores memory, identity, grief, healing, and sibling bonds – what happens when they splinter, and what it takes to mend them.
For fans of Liane Moriarty’s APPLES NEVER FALL and Ann Patchett’s TOM LAKE.
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 and the Angel of the North, The Music Shop, Miss Benson's Beetle, and a collection of interlinked short stories, A Snow Garden & Other Stories.
