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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. Rachel's books have been translated into thirty-seven languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The critically acclaimed film of the novel, for which Rachel also wrote the screenplay, was released in 2023. Miss Benson's Beetle won the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize in 2021. Rachel was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year in December 2012 and was shortlisted for the UK Author of the Year in 2014. In 2024 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Kingston University. Rachel has written over twenty original afternoon plays and adaptations of the classics for BBC Radio 4. She lives with her family near Stroud.
Sparkling and addictive … Rachel Joyce is so incredibly good and wise on families and siblings, pacing out a story’s secrets so that you have to read one more page. [It’s My Cousin Rachel meets The Enchanted April.] I couldn’t love it more. -- Harriet Evans, author of The Stargazers and The Garden of Lost and Found The Homemade God is a beautiful portrayal of family, art and the things we inherit from our parents, both creative and emotional. Joyce writes with great emotional acuity about the complexity of sibling relationships in a richly woven family drama, with all Joyce's trademark compassion and insight. It's a wonderful piece of storytelling. -- Hannah Beckerman, author of The Forgetting A new novel by Rachel Joyce is always a cause for celebration and this was no exception. I have always found something dark in her fiction and I feel this has been played down by reviewers at the expense of the warmth and healing that is also part of her great appeal. This terrific novel absolutely refused to be cosy and provided all sorts of misdirections and a sense of foreboding throughout. At first I could hear echoes of My Cousin Rachel and feel my anxieties and sympathies being expertly manipulated as I tried to work out who I was rooting for, but it was so much more subtle than that - none of the characters are wholly good or bad or dislikeable, because Rachel always shows us why they behave as they do. The missing picture was a neat image of the siblings' struggles to see their childhood with any kind of clarity. Another triumph of insight and empathy! -- Clare Chambers
