Ripeness: A Novel

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 ballerina sister, 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 fashioned a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend, Méabh, 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 connection and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and the fractured history of her own family. What did they give up when they sent the baby away? What kind of family has he been given? What kind of life? And how was hers changed by his arrival and departure?

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