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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.
"Moss's characters are delightfully complex, giving shape to the narrative's meditation on belonging. This leaves readers with much to chew on." —Publishers Weekly
"Moss directs her keen and graceful sensibility toward modern-day Ireland and 1960s Italy with equal aplomb." —Kirkus 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
This information about Ripeness was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo Credit: © Sophie Davidson
Sarah Moss is the author of the novels The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall, among other books. Her works have been named among the best books of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times, and have been selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. She was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.
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