Ruth: A Novel

by Kate Riley

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

One woman’s perspective on living in a Christian commune drives this reflective yet playful, richly layered yet laugh-out-loud funny novel. If you’ve always wanted a sneak peak at what it feels like to be a part of a deeply cloistered religious community, this story invites you in.

A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick!

“It would never work out, but I’m in love with Ruth.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A wonderful, loving, tenderly teasing and often moving portrait … [a] standout.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“There are inklings of greatness in Kate Riley’s first novel… I suspect it will become an underground classic.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

In this mesmerizing and profound novel, the arc of a woman's life in a devout, insular community challenges our deepest assumptions about what infuses life with meaning.

Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning she braids her hair and wears the same costume, sings the same breakfast song in a family room identical to every other family room in the community; every one of these moments is meant to be a prayer, but to Ruth they remain puzzles. Her life is seen in glimpses through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, as she tries to manage her own perilous curiosity in a community built on holy mystery. Is she happy? Might this in fact be happiness? Ruth immerses us in an experience that challenges our most fervent beliefs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593715949
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Kate Riley was raised in New York City. This is her last book.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Ruth

“A wonderful, loving, tenderly teasing and often moving portrait. . . .Riley achieves a balance of warmth and subtle hilarity in recounting Ruth’s many slips from the ‘tightrope of obedience’ . . . [a] standout.” —Wall Street Journal

“There are inklings of greatness in Kate Riley’s first novel, Ruth. It claims a place on that high modern shelf next to the offbeat books of Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman and Nell Zink — those possessors of wrinkled comic sensibilities rooted in pain…Ruth is in touch with the oldest and darkest things in our makeup, yet revels in a very modern sense of what Riley calls ‘brainy female despair.’ Under Riley’s author photograph, on the back flap, a sentence reads: ‘This is her last book.’ I hope that’s not so.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“What really interests Riley is how a bright child’s mind resists the nonsensical demands of theology and how a young woman’s wit chafes in a closed community. … The author’s wry voice never flattens the meringue tips of Ruth’s childlike wonder. And later, as Ruth feels increasingly cramped in the little church, Riley maintains ironic distance, careful to avoid collapsing into the character inspired by her own experience. Her epigraphic style, informed by decades of sermons, aphorisms and comic retorts, ensures the novel’s delightful buoyancy. … Ruth’s … thwarted ambitions, her sacrifices for family and church, compose a melody as familiar as a melancholy old hymn. Riley’s ability to plumb that slip of salvation — in a way that stays true to Ruth’s life — is just one of this novel’s many graces.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Ruth is a granular portrait of a truly collective place that sometimes reads like a sidelong assessment of our lonely, technologically fractured time. . .Like the best novels of everyday life, it’s strikingly ambivalent, folding in all the moral unclarity and dissatisfaction that even people who pray, sing, and labor without complaint might feel on a Tuesday morning. . . It’s unlike anything I’ve read in a long time.” —The Cut

“A generous coming-of-age story. . .Its constant vacillation between droll superiority and unabashed earnestness makes it hard for the reader to determine whether they know better than the characters or if, in fact, they have quite a lot to learn from them. . . .Riley’s great trick is to tap into the anodyne, to make Ruth a woman whose concerns. . . are essentially universal.”—The Atlantic

“What a strange and wonderful book this is — emphasis on the strange. No, wait — emphasis on the wonderful.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Riley’s wonderful debut follows a woman at odds with the Christian commune she was born into. … She never loses sight of the characters’ humanity and spiritual searching, and she adeptly explores how faith and love can be sustained. It’s a remarkable achievement.” –Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“Riley’s first novel fascinates with its realistic depiction of Hutterite life and beliefs and the extraordinary narration of Ruth’s rich and idiosyncratic inner life from childhood to parenthood.”—Booklist

“Cheeky, inquisitive, and a delightful pain in the neck, Ruth carries the novel with aplomb. . . A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.”—Kirkus, STARRED review

“Riley’s narrator is part wry anthropologist, part reluctant memoirist. Hers is very different from the kind of candour we have become accustomed to in contemporary fiction: it’s essentially withholding, and the emotional payoff is to be found not in the explicit excavation of trauma, but in bittersweet moments of levity and flights of whimsy … Literary culture has become so mired in therapeutic discourse that we’ve almost forgotten there are other, subtler ways to explore pain.”—The Guardian

“Irresistibly smart and funny.” —Jenny Offill, author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation

“The serenely weird testament of an unintentional heroine in an intentional community, and an act of novelistic grace that deserves not only cult status but its own religion.” —Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Netanyahus

“A detailed, delicate study of how character is formed by collision with so many sharp corners that they form a perfect circle – how we entrap ourselves in the choices of others, glimpsing freedom in flashes.” —Nell Zink, author of Mislaid and Doxology

From the Publisher

★ 2025-06-07
A woman maintains her independence and questioning spirit while walking the narrow “tightrope of obedience” required by membership in an insular religious sect.

Ruth Della Scholl is born into a Michigan branch of the Brotherhood, a fictional Anabaptist community, in 1963. With a strict, austere communalism, the group eschews materialism and competition and puts its members’ love of God above all else, but Ruth defies any stereotype of a fundamentalist. While other members come and go—including Ruth’s brother, whose disappearance is never discussed by their parents—Ruth tries her best to be a good Brotherhood “sister.” When a friend she’s made at a community college offers to help her escape the Brotherhood, Ruth is shocked. She doesn’t want to leave. Yet she scrutinizes every resentment and frustration she experiences, as well as occasional joy. With humor and barely suppressed passion, she describes her life from infancy through middle age through a very close third-person narrative. The novel is an accumulation of random moments: her distress when her 8th-birthday presents are packed away because she eats a candy bar her mother tells her to put down; the realization that the Bible doesn’t exactly describe the world—“leprosy still existed, pharaohs did not”; the discovery that a boy she secretly loves is marrying someone else. Along the way, Ruth sketches in an abundance of minor characters, too many to keep track of, from a young teenager who had to leave her previous community for “thoughts and deeds of impurity” to an older convert who rejects his former political activism as ego-driven. Ruth’s eventual marriage to an irritating but endearing husband rings all too true. Mothering her three children, especially the unruly son in whom she sees herself, is difficult. The Brotherhood seeps into every corner of her life, and readers will learn a lot about Anabaptist sects. But cheeky, inquisitive, and a delightful pain in the neck, Ruth carries the novel with aplomb.

A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.

Kirkus Reviews