The Homemade God

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 happens when they splinter, and what it would take to mend them.