Ripeness: A Novel

by Sarah Moss

Overview

A story of sisterhood, forbidden desire, lost connection, and what it means to find a home among strangers.

Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home.

Decades later, happily divorced, recently moved, and full of new energy, Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child her mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of family and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and her own fractured history. What did they give up when they sent him away? What kind of life has he been given? And how did it change their own lives?

In Ripeness, Sarah Moss has again tapped into the questions that haunt us individually and as communities. Ripeness is an extraordinary novel about familial love and the bonds we forge across time, migration and new beginnings, and what it is to have somewhere to belong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374609016
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Sarah Moss is the author of the novels The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall, and the memoir My Good Bright Wolf. These and her other books have been listed among the best of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times and selected for The New York Times Book Review’s Editors’ Choice. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.

Editorial Reviews

“Sex and childbirth, emigrant and exile, the present and the past: Sarah Moss’s ambidextrous talent is evident on every page of this elegant novel. It is intelligent, but never disembodied; evocative, but never sentimental; honest, but never cruel. Ripeness is a book of tart and lasting pleasures.”
—Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

“Tender and rueful, Ripeness is a tale of being a foreigner that moves between 1960s Italy and 2020s Ireland, finding pain and bliss in both. Working at the height of her mature powers, Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence.”
—Emma Donoghue, author of The Paris Express

From the Publisher

2025-06-07
An elderly British emigrant in the west of Ireland narrates the birth of her nephew more than 50 years earlier.

Edith, a woman in her early 70s, has made an enviable life for herself in County Clare. She lives alone in a cottage there, financially secure after getting divorced and selling property near Dublin. She has a lover and a cadre of friends, including Méabh, a local with whom Edith has found a deep rapport. And she’s found an even deeper rapport with Ireland itself, though she hails from a farm in Derbyshire in the north of England, raised by her farmer father and her “glamorous” French Jewish mother, whose own parents and sister were sent to Belsen during the war. Edith’s status as an outsider in Ireland means she has “learnt, as immigrants do…by keeping quiet, standing back, observing.” This sense of life on the periphery also connects her in memory to her past when, on the brink of attending Oxford, a 17-year-old Edith is sent to stay at a villa near Lake Como with her older sister, a ballerina. Elegant and cosmopolitan like their mother, Lydia is everything cerebral Edith feels she isn’t. Lydia is also eight months pregnant and opaque about the baby’s paternity, determined to give the baby up for adoption and return to her demanding life as a dancer. Moss switches back and forth between Edith’s present, told in close third person, and the past, told in first person and addressed to the baby that Edith and her sister await. Through these parallel narratives, and with her characteristically sinuous style, Moss is able to explore the idea of belonging: What does it mean to belong to a place? To a lineage? A family? A home?

Moss directs her keen and graceful sensibility toward modern-day Ireland and 1960s Italy with equal aplomb.

Kirkus Reviews