Home is where the art is: The rise of the epic domestic novel books

‘T“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy declares at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she leaves the dazzling Emerald City for Aunt Em’s farm in Kansas. It’s a powerful metaphor for the way the domestic sphere is often depicted in art: action, adventure and drama happen ‘out there’ in glorious technicolor tones, with the home contrastingly presented in sober sepia tones. Home may finally be the place we long for, but only once we’ve left it behind.

While working on my second novel, Natural Disasters, I occasionally struggled with the potential dangers of putting domestic life front and center. The story takes place over the course of 24 hours, following a woman who plans to spend her last day of maternity leave spending quality time with her two young children (spoiler: it doesn’t go as planned).

Why—I kept asking myself—would a writer with young children, who works from home, spend the few precious hours she has to write engaged in the very environment she is trying to keep away from those same few precious hours? Why, in fact, would a reader choose to spend their precious free time consuming more everyday life, when one of the main selling points of fiction is its ability to help you escape or transcend reality? However, what could be more convincing? Home is where we live out much of our lives: it’s the place where our most formative relationships form as children, and the arena in which those early dynamics play out in later years.

However, for authors, and women in particular, writing about domesticity presents a particularly fraught possibility: the declaration of personality is almost always construed as a political, if not actively dissident, act.

In 2001, Rachel Cusk received so much criticism for her memoir Life’s Work that in the months following its publication she “felt constant regret” that she had written it. By telling the truth about her experiences with motherhood, she felt she had “committed an act of violence” against her family. Her 2012 memoir Aftermath, which detailed the collapse of her marriage, was no less controversial: she found the gap between her life and the book “completely violated”, with criticisms of her personal life published in newspapers and broadcast on the radio.

Fiction, where emotional truth is preferred over truth, may provide a more forgiving medium. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five-volume epic The Cazalet Chronicles, though based on the Howard family, arouses intense adoration in its readers rather than rage. It certainly helped Howard (unlike Cusk) that he was writing 50 years after the events of the first novel, far from the heat of its inspiration.

Part of the great charm of these books is the close attention Howard pays to everyday life in a bygone era. Tessa Hadley notes that the prose sometimes “reads like a hymn to household management,” and taken together, the entire project could be described as a domestic saga, in which the resilience and rhythms of Home Place (the aptly named Cazalet family residence) over the decades provide constant solace against the random challenges of the outside world.

In goodness and good love, Published earlier this year, Yvette Edwards is also using the time to great effect navigating her local world. Beginning at the deathbed of her heroine Eileen, Edwards’s story goes back through the years to Eileen’s early married life.

This elegantly innovative approach reveals how attitudes, roles, and expectations change (and don’t change) across generations: the effect is like stripping the walls of an old house, where each layer of wallpaper is a testament to the mores of its time.

But the past holds an allure that current reality may find difficult to achieve. What can a novel about contemporary domestic life add to our knowledge? If familiarity breeds contempt, what could be more familiar than home, with its absurd routines and demands?

In Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Lucy Ellman answers these questions and runs an extravagant race with them. Ellman’s heroine, an Ohio housewife, runs a pie-making business out of her own kitchen, giving her unlimited time to think, contemplate, and contemplate everything from Donald Trump to her mother’s death and her ice cream’s annoying refusal to dissolve.

At more than 1,000 pages, Ducks, Newburyport serves as a kind of existential counterpart to another local giant: Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. By writing a work of such scale and stylistic boldness (almost every paragraph begins with “fact”), Ellman transforms the domestic experience into a philosophical and heroic one: the woman who methodically clasps pastry on cherry pies simultaneously grapples with existence in all its light and shadows.

It can be said that the primary concern of literary fiction has always been “how should one live?”, but in recent years, global instability, the threat of environmental collapse, and technological revolution have given rise to the problem of how to build and sustain a good life amid… All this Sharper in focus.

In director Vincenzo Latronico’s 2025 film Perfection (translated by Sophie Hughes), protagonists Tom and Anna are, depending on your point of view, the beneficiaries or victims of technological disruptors like Airbnb and Instagram. Several times a year they supplement their freelance income by subletting their apartment in Berlin, packing up their laptops, and going to their parents for weekends or holidays.

For Tom and Anna, “home” is a meticulously curated environment—the novel meticulously distorts the ubiquitous millennial aesthetic across IG and IRL to the point that it was difficult for these millennials to look into the eyes of their mid-century coffee table for weeks after reading. But no matter how carefully we frame our works of art, or artfully arrange our houseplants, true perfection is unattainable: dirty and uncomfortable real life always gets in the way.

Latronico exposes the hollowness and illusion of the pursuit of perfection, but he has no easy answers. The building blocks that were once taken for granted (a steady job, trustworthy housing, financial security) are at best uncertain. For young, urban, educated people like Tom and Anna, the domestic sphere was no longer a welcome refuge, but another potential source of revenue, whose existential costs (always accelerating, never stabilizing) may outweigh the material gains.

A preoccupation with how to live now is also at the core of director Ayşe Gül Savas’s film “Anthropologists,” which follows another young couple making their way in a foreign city. For Asia and Manu, who do not share a common heritage, domesticity is about how much of their cultures to preserve, and how much to invent for themselves.

It is like the novel of perfection, a lean novel, but its concerns are heavy. Savaş realizes that everyday life has a sacred quality alongside the banal, or perhaps it is the nature of banality – with its rituals and repetition – that makes it innately sacred. We’re all faced with a host of major choices (career, family, where to settle), but it’s the endless smaller choices—how we spend our Sundays, interact with our neighbors, drink our morning coffee—that shape our sense of purpose, meaning, and joy in the world.

In 2024, when I was having doubts about my own domestic novel in the making, Miranda July’s All Fours landed on my desk: a wild, funny, taboo-busting fantasy about testing the limits and boundaries of everyday life.

July depicts a family unit full of love and intimacy, yet her narrator does not shy away from the conflict that even the best-case scenarios (happy child, engaged parent) can stir up in working mothers: “Walking around my house, I felt afraid, and I felt guilty about everything I did or didn’t do.” She likens returning home after a day at her desk to “Buzz Aldrin getting ready to unload the dishwasher upon his return from the moon.” Dorothy, newly returned from Oz, can certainly sympathize.

In July, the traditional function of the home as a haven becomes complicated: what was originally familiar becomes strange. In her four books, she turns the question of how to honor the creative self while maintaining an earthly existence into such an epic endeavor that, at the end of the novel, it feels as if we, too, have been to outer space and back, standing dazed in our kitchens, clutching the cutlery basket in the dishwasher.

All four It enabled me to confront my own draft once again, armed with compelling evidence that the domestic novel does not need study, quiet, or any other euphemism for boredom; And a renewed understanding that home—where we are most intimate and least seen—can be an environment as powerful, vibrant, and stimulating as any we might encounter outside the front door.