For lovers of ‘weird girl fiction’, look no further for your next read than Welsh author Rhiannon Grist. Blending fairy folk horror with an irrational, unlikeable and yet wholly human female protagonist, her debut novel Home Sick is one for the TBR list.
Home Sick follows Tamsin, a young woman seeking a fresh start in the Scottish Highlands after a violent incident at her workplace. Awkward, bitter and self-loathing, Tamsin is left disappointed when she realises the isolated cottage she’s moving into is actually a semi-detached, with an odd woman lurking in the other half. As Tamsin attempts to piece her life back together, you can’t help but sense that there’s something off about her new neighbour…
Rhiannon discusses the inspiration behind the story, how her Welsh identity has shaped her writing, and the recent surge in ‘weird girl fiction’.
Firstly, I’d love to know the inspiration behind Home Sick.
The idea for Home Sick first came as a bit of a bad joke. I was with my writing group, and we were coming up with horror stories for the socially anxious. I came up with the idea that you move to this remote cottage in the middle of nowhere to live a nice, isolated life, only to turn up and find out that it’s a semi-detached and there’s a total stranger living in the other half. I really started working on it in 2021 after I moved during the pandemic. I don’t know to this day if it was latent medical trauma left over from the pandemic or because I’d made a lot of changes in my life at that time, but when I moved, I had such a horrible time settling in. All the rooms felt wrong. The light felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. I became convinced, deep down, that this would be the last place I’d ever live, that I had moved here to die, and that I was going to die within a couple of months. I would lie in bed and almost feel death creeping up my legs. It was horrible. It lasted about two years. I felt a lot of shame for it as well, because obviously a lot of people were suffering much bigger problems during that time. I was basically struggling with a house move, so I didn’t feel like I could talk about it that much. Eventually I just started writing down what I was feeling, then I amped everything up to eleven, changed a lot of details, changed a lot about the characters and what happens. And eventually that became Home Sick.
I became convinced, deep down, that this would be the last place I’d ever live, that I had moved here to die.
You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that your grandmother and your father inspired you to write, while the success of the Harry Potter series helped you realise that ‘author’ was a viable career choice. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.
With writing in general, my grandmother used to write poetry; she was involved in a lot of community amateur dramatics in South Wales. My dad was as well; he used to write his own pantomimes and plays. So, I’d always had community-based theatre in the house when I was growing up. Regarding Harry Potter, I always feel conflicted about this because it had such a positive beginning for me. Obviously, I do not agree with the choices that the author has made, but back when the first Harry Potter books came out, a lot of the narrative was that this was a single mother who’d written books in a café. Now, where I come from in Bridgend, a single mum looks very different to what J.K. Rowling was; she was a graduate of Exeter University in Classics. But anyway, the idea of what I had in my head of a single mum, I remember at thirteen years old thinking ‘wow, if someone who has all those challenges is able to write a book, then surely I’ll be able to’.
Home Sick is set in the fictional town of Carlinsrest. Is there a real town in the Scottish Highlands that Carlinsrest was modelled after?
Carlinsrest is fictional, but it is based on a town that I briefly travelled through. The town that I based it on is called Callander, which is on the borders of the Trossachs, this big, forested area. I went up there for this forest holiday, you know, where you get one of those cabins in the woods with a hot tub out front and you can see the loch, and you can go for walks up in the trees. Beautiful. It took us a train ride, a bus ride and a taxi to get there. When we arrived in Callander, it’s this beautiful, picturesque, hallmark-movie sort of place: there’s a lovely river and there’s the bridge and these lovely sort of pubs and little tea rooms. Hanging over it, however, was this big hill that was covered in this pine forest, and it felt almost oppressive. It felt like this green wave that was going to crash down on the town. I remember feeling the comparison between this very pretty town and this sudden behemoth of nature just hanging behind it. It was really striking. So when I started creating Carlinsrest, I based it on that.
I remember feeling the comparison between this very pretty town and this sudden behemoth of nature just hanging behind it.
As a Welsh author, how does your Welshness shine through in your writing?
It’s a tricky one to say because I loathe to make any generalizations about identity. I’ve also not lived in Wales for eighteen years, and I do feel like the Wales that I was a part of has been gone for eighteen years. Countries and cultures continue to evolve beyond you. However, I think a lot of it comes from the rich storytelling culture in Wales. There’s a very rich arts culture, for example, we have the Eisteddfod in school every year. I won the Bard in my primary school twice, although I didn’t ever win it in my secondary school, they were much tougher. But that culture of performing and storytelling and poetry has always been a big part of my life. Not just in my family, but there was a rich amateur dramatics culture as I was growing up, and a rich youth theatre culture as well. So, the idea of performing and telling stories has always been a part of my makeup.
I’ve seen your works be described as ‘weird girl fiction’. What does this label mean to you personally, and why do you think there’s such a growing market for ‘weird girl fiction’?
I think for a long time women thought ‘if I’m nice enough and pretty enough and smart enough, and I explain myself rationally enough, I will be given humanity’, and a lot of women have just given up on that. I remember in the early 2000s, the way that a lot of feminism in TV shows and movies manifested was to make a hyper competent woman. This is a woman who was a doctor, but she could also kick butt, but she also always knew the right things to say. But that’s an awful lot of pressure to be that woman, and I think we’re having a swing in the other direction–Fleabag is a great example–with women who don’t have it all together and don’t have the answers and aren’t good feminists all the time. It’s a fundamentally human thing to be tired of being the person with the agency, of being absolutely in control of your life. I think that’s where the tradwife movement has stemmed from: women just want a simple life where someone tells them what to do and they just do simple tasks. I think a lot of these genres are giving women room to be more honest, to make mistakes, to be selfish and terrible, to be needy and unhinged and irrational. There’s been such a pressure, because of the idea that women are irrational, that we have to lean into this hyper rationality for a while. But we’re people. Nobody’s one hundred percent rational all the time. That’s an impossible burden to put on anybody. So, I think we’re now seeing a lot of books where we’re letting women be mad, but having agency with it, owning her life and the mistakes that she makes.
It’s a fundamentally human thing to be tired of being the person with the agency, of being absolutely in control of your life.
Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist is out 16th July 2026 (UK). Pre-order/purchase here. (not an ad/not affiliated)
Words by Kitty Connolly
Images provided by Natalie Charlesworth at Rebellion Publishing. Thank you to Solaris Books for the Advance Review Copy.
