Review: 'Home Sick' by Rhiannon Grist

I saw quite a bit of hype for this book after I requested a review copy of it and that made me nervous. If you've read reviews of mine before, you know that I tend to avoid books at the height of their hype because I want to make up my own mind. But then I gave in and started Home Sick and basically didn't put it down until I was done with it! I had a great, but difficult time, which is, I think, the point. Thanks to Solaris and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 14/07/2026
Publisher: Solaris

“The symmetry should have tipped me off.”

After a violent incident at work, Tamsin goes looking for a fresh start in a remote cottage far away from her old life. Here she could make real friends, find a job she loves, become a whole new person, even.

But the solitary cottage is actually a semi-detached, with only a thin wall separating her from a total stranger. Her neighbour is an enigma. Dowdy one moment, vivacious the next, but always wearing an unnerving smile. Tamsin can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with her, especially when she starts experiencing disturbances in her own home.

As the locals share strange stories about her house, and her barely contained paranoia spirals out of control, Tamsin begins to suspect that the past she was so desperate to escape might never let her go.

What first drew me to Home Sick was its tag line: 'This house isn't haunted. She is.' While the house in Home Sick definitely has haunted vibes, it is truly its protagonist, Tamsin, who is haunted by her own past. Rhiannon Grist draws on various genres and histories to create the kind of environment in which a katabasis can take place. Katabasis is not just the title of a R.F. Kuang book, it is a Greek word that means a descent, often into Hell (hence why Kuang named her book thusly), but also, within literature, into the earth or the subconscious. In Home Sick, Rhiannon Grist tells of a katabasis into the self, perhaps the most difficult one around. Tamsin has to face not just her past, but also her own perception of it and herself and in some ways this is quite difficult to read. Although I don't have the same experiences as Tamsin, I do have ones that fall into similar categories and so there was something difficult but also cathartic (look, another Greek word!) about following Tamsin into the dark. 

Tamsin arrives at the house she bought on something of a panicked whim when she had to leave her life behind. Now here she is, in the countryside, and it turns out that it's actually a semi-detached and she has a weird neighbour. But Tamsin needs to get away, start fresh, and so she tries, she really does. She talks to her neighbour, she goes into the village, she buys a rug, but nothing is quite right. Her neighbour makes weird noises at night, the villagers are odd, and the rug is too small. This is only the start of her problems though and it becomes clear that she needs to not jsut face her past but, most importantly, herself. We spend almost all of Home Sick inside Tamsin's slowly spiralling thoughts and as the reader you pick up on the fact that something is actually, supernaturally wrong much quicker than she does. This could, with a different author perhaps, have led to me disliking Tamsin and sometimes I did want to shake her, but there is an immense amount of care in her characterisation. I also liked the surrounding characters, especially how my thoughts about them changed as Tamsin's did. 

With Home Sick Rhiannon Grist crafts a delightfully uncomfortable reading experience. We are presented a protagonist who is evasive about her past, angry but also so scared, judgemental and confused, in short, deeply unreliable. I found myself really caring for her, though, and thus getting really involved in her story. Home Sick draws on aspects of the Gothic, a genre that is deeply focused on the past as a source of torment, a place that needs to be confronted in order to move on. Grist similarly uses folklore as a way of laying out Tamsin's journey and I loved those elements as well. Both come together in the idea of the doppelganger, a mirror that reflects your best or your worst qualities and makes you question who you really are. These existential questions about whether you actually exist, if it even matters, and who you even are, make up the heart of the novel and I really enjoyed that. There are definitely scenes in Home Sick that play with horror and terror and they also worked very well for me, although I wouldn't say Home Sick is actively scary. The terror is a part of the experience, rather than the focus, if that makes sense. The novel also presents an interesting meditation on violence and anger, on how our emotions are useful and important but can also overrun us. Most of Home Sick was great but sometimes it felt a little too neat, considering the messiness it deals with. I very much look forward to reading more by Rhiannon Grist in the future!

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

Home Sick definitely lived up to the hype for me! For me, it struck the perfect balance between being delightfully creepy and being insightful, creating beautiful imagery and making a point.