Rachel Joyce talks to Lucy Atkins

Million-selling novelist Rachel Joyce talks about her latest work, The Homemade God, a story about memory, identity, grief, healing and sibling bonds.

World-famous artist Vic Kemp has relied on his children to run his life since the death of their mother. When Vic announces he is to remarry to Bella-Mae, a fellow artist 50 years his junior, they object. He heads off with Bella-Mae to his summer home in Italy, and six weeks later he is dead. His children gather at the home and are forced to confront wounds suffered at the hands of their father and each other. Will their family bonds hold? And is Bella-Mae a force that will destroy them or set them free?

Joyce’s books have been translated into 37 languages and have sold millions worldwide. They include The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and recently turned into a film starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton, and Miss Benson’s Beetle, winner of the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Here she talks to critic and fellow novelist Lucy Atkins, author of Magpie Lane.