Like all Sarah Moss books this explores isolation, but is a departure from her recent novels which were very short and cranked up the tension to propel you to the conclusion. This is a much slower read as it tries to unpick how important nature and nurture are to our sense of self and belonging.

The story is told through dual timelines. One appears to observe Edith’s life in modern day Ireland where we see how she, as a Jewish immigrant, reacts to Ukrainian refugees joining the rural community as well as events in her friends lives. The second is her reminiscing about a time when she was young and went to stay with her sister who was about to give birth at Lake Como.

My third Sarah Moss novel - I’ve also read her memoir - and once again I’m finding that it is full of nature and also about a sense of belonging. Edith is in her 70s, the daughter of a French-Jewish mother and a Derbyshire farmer. She is divorced with an adult son, Pat, who does not live with her in rural Ireland. Her mother left France in 1941 but the rest of the family stayed and were caught up in the holocaust. This is the reason that Edith, following her mother’s experience, makes a comment about having the right passport to show to the right person - about always being ready to leave. There is a feeling that Edith has never truly felt a sense of belonging, she never even had a close relationship with her mother who was never able to settle anywhere, always searching for her lost family. Edith’s is one point of view - written in the third person. The second POV is that of 17 year old Edith and is in the first person as we gradually come to realise that she is writing a memoir. The young Edith has been ‘sent’ by her mother to stay with her ballet dancer sister, Lydia, in Italy where she is awaiting the birth of an unplanned child - a child that she did not terminate because it would be maternally Jewish. Edith is to stay with her and to phone a French convent when the child is born -something that her mother has arranged. These memories have been brought to the fore in adult Edith because her friend, Meabh, has been contacted by a brother in America that she had never known about, a child who was possibly sent to the Magdalen Laundries and then sent out for adoption. We see how the young Edith bonded with the child and how Lydia refused all contact and the words describing Edith’s feelings for the child are so moving. Through the POV of the elderly Edith, we get the themes of belonging. She might live in Ireland but she is still outside, as is her lover, Gunter, a German who settled in Ireland. And yet, she raises the question that maybe Meabh’s brother belongs in Ireland more than she does because he was born there - a DNA test proves it. An interesting novel and I have to say I much preferred the Italian section and walking side by side with the 17 year old Edith.

Family love, new beginnings, belonging; two books in one. Excellent novel touching on many contemporary themes.

With thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for an early Kindle copy of Ripeness by Sarah Moss.

I'm always keen to read anything new by Sarah Moss, so I was really happy to get an early copy of Ripeness. That said, it wasn’t my favourite of hers, for a couple of reasons.

First, the lack of punctuation made it a bit hard going. I don’t usually mind that kind of thing—I’ve read other books that do it well—but here it was paired with long paragraphs and a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that made it tough to stay focused. I had to work quite hard to keep track of the story, though that might say more about me than the book.

The second thing was the structure. I found older Edith’s story less engaging than young Edith’s, and it felt a little unnecessary. I was more interested in what happened in the decades in between, but we didn’t get much of that.

Still, you read Sarah Moss for the writing, and that part didn’t disappoint. Her descriptions, dry humour, and sharp observations are as brilliant as ever—she could make a shopping list sound good. I loved the characters I was meant to love and rolled my eyes at the rest, just as intended. I just wanted a bit more from this one..

unfortunately i didn’t feel compelled to continue reading ripeness and decided to DNF 31% in. certainly not a bad book, but overall it was too slow for me, i had a love-hate relationship with the writing style, and i struggled in particular to stay engaged with the historical timeline compared to the present-day one. (i would leave this unrated as, despite being quite far into the book i don't think i read enough to confidently rate it; for NetGalley review purposes i will be rating a 3*.)

the writing is so hard to review because there were some parts that i thought were beautifully written and gorgeously evocative, and others which felt like they were trying a bit too hard. i was frequently oscillating between finding the writing either wonderful or pretentious. i’ve never read sarah moss before; maybe if you have you will gel with her writing more easily than i did.

the story is a dual timeline, following edith in the present as an older woman living in ireland and as a young girl helping her pregnant sister in italy. i’d definitely say i had a better time reading about present-day edith and her musings on life. despite being a third of the way into the book, i felt i was still waiting for something to actually happen in the past, which is where events were supposed to kick off. from the blurb, there is obviously something big that happens, but the build up was so slow that i didn’t care to read on to figure out what that was.

i am reviewing this late, which means ripeness has been out since yesterday. i wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend this but i can imagine this having its fair share of fans. massive thanks to Pan Macmillan, Picador, and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review!

Having read all of Sarah Moss's fiction to date (plus her memoir Names for the Sea), I've become very familiar with her thought-world, and have started to wonder if she's always going to set my teeth on edge a bit. This is not a criticism of Moss or her prose, but more a statement of incompatibility; I get the sense that Moss's writer-self and my reader-self don't quite click. The reason I've kept reading her, despite this mismatch, is that she often creates exceptional writing. For me, this has tended to be especially evident when she moves outside her comfort zone, adopting either a male protagonist (The Tidal Zone), a historical setting (Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children, parts of Night Waking) or a hint of the speculative (Cold Earth). On the other hand, since Ghost Wall, I've found that her contemporary novellas have given me diminishing returns. Both Summerwater and, especially, The Fell got my teeth grinding more than they usually do, because of their on-the-nose social commentary and increasingly judgemental tone. She often gets stuck with her middle-class, woolly liberal characters, understanding the limitations of their mindsets and yet seemingly not quite able to think outside them.

So what about Ripeness, her latest novel? It sums up everything I just said, because it's essentially made up of two novellas - one of which I loved, and one of which I found very tiresome. They're both told from the perspective of Edith, the daughter of a French-Jewish mother who managed to escape the Holocaust while the rest of her family ended up in death camps. In the 1960s, Edith is seventeen years old and travelling to Italy to help her older ballet dancer sister, Lydia, with the birth of an illegitimate baby that Lydia intends to have adopted. In the present day, Edith is now in her seventies and living in rural Ireland, where she wrestles with questions of blood and belonging; despite her many years in Ireland, can she ever really feel that this is her country? As the daughter of an exile - the novel very lightly touches on the subject of Israel but mostly swerves it - does she really have a country at all?

The section of the novel set in sixties Italy is both enchanting and gutwrenching. Moss does a great job at portraying Edith as a sympathetic younger sister who still tends to fall into rigid patterns of thinking. I felt deeply for Lydia, whom Edith clearly does not understand and who has to follow through on her decision to give up her baby utterly unsupported and alone. At the same time, the descriptive prose is just gorgeous and immersive, and the hills above Lake Como come vividly to life. Unfortunately, the interspersed chapters narrated by Edith's older self not only seem to have little to do with the Italian sections but actually diminish them. It would have been wonderful to have a narrative counterpoint to Edith's judgements, but instead we just get more Edith. Her worries about refugees and adoptions technically have thematic links to the earlier material, but it just doesn't come together. And while I liked her a lot as an adolescent, she definitely became one of Moss's smug liberals as an older woman.

Will I keep on reading Moss? I think it depends on what she writes about. I will certainly keep on recommending her, because I know many readers who enjoy her more than me. 3.5 stars.

Ripeness follows the story of Edith, a 17-year old teenager in the 1960s and an her as divorced woman in the present day. She is a daughter of a Holocaust refugee and an English farmer. As a teenager, however, she has a brief stint in rural Italy, where she helps her pregnant sister, a ballet dancer, prepare for the birth of the child she is set to give up to maintain her career.

I enjoyed the style of writing. The topics covered are heavy and close to our history in Ireland. I liked the connection between Lydie's pregnancy situation and Maeve's long lost brother.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publisher for an advanced copy in return for an honest review.

I recently read Summer water by Sarah Moss and really loved it, so was looking forward to the opportunity to read another of her books. However, I have quite mixed feelings about this one, I started it twice as I found it very difficult to get into partly because of the slow pace and long sentences. Once I'd started properly I still found it too ponderous and meandering at times but enjoyed the dual time line and gradually unfolding of the story. There was also the occasional sentence which made me stop and read it again because it was such a beautiful phrase or description. "there are no border guards at the chambers of your heart. Its only the immigration officers who might care where your mother was born"" is one that will stay with me.
Thank you to netgalley and Pan Macmillan for an advance copy of this book.
3.5 rounded up to 4 stars

I have thoroughly enjoyed every Sarah Moss book I’ve read and her newest novel Ripeness is no exception.

Ripeness is the dual timeline story of Edith, one part where she’s in the 1960’s summer holiday in between school and Oxford university helping her pregnant ballet dancer sister in rural Italy and the other part where she is retired and living her happy divorced life in Ireland. Moss really gets inside her characters’ heads and makes the reader understand their extraordinary yet ordinary lives. This novel is a coming of age novel, a coming of old age novel, an exploration of what happens when there is ineffective birth control and also a meditation on the themes of ripeness and readiness.

A recommended read for anyone who wants a human centred story.

In Sarah Moss’s Ripeness, we meet Edith in her seventies, living on the west coast of Ireland in a community containing different degrees of outsiders: asylum seekers housed in a local hotel; Ukrainian refugees; Gunter, a German expat potter; and Edith herself. Ostensibly English, Edith lived outside Dublin for thirty-odd years, her cottage initially a holiday home. Sometimes she’s ‘local enough’, other times feels she’ll never be local anywhere now and is conscious not to be an ‘old white lady saviour’. She swims in the sea, attends yoga classes and has sex with Gunter: a late-life template I found attractive.
As Edith lends an ear to her beleaguered friend Méabh, she reflects on earlier events. Her mother escaped the Holocaust, sent away from Paris by her family into domestic service in Sheffield. She’s ‘good at leaving: men, children, countries’ and is away from home (again) when Edith’s older sister Lydia, a ballerina, finds herself pregnant. So Maman dispatches the 17-year-old Edith to the villa above Lake Garda where Lydia is secreted away from public gaze. In a glorious summer and autumn above the lake, Edith’s eyes are opened to how others live and how they are judged.
I’d have been happy to spend longer in Edith’s company at both ages, and recommend Ripeness if you think you’d enjoy a story of family and friends that also touches on migration and the consequences of war.

I always love Moss's writing and how she makes her characters feel so lifelike, but I had some trouble here in finding the main theme of the novel. It's about so many things: identity, migration, rape, etc. I didn't really get what Moss wanted to say. Still, I did enjoy reading this very much.
Thank you Picador and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

The present day; Edith, a divorcee in her seventies, is living a happy later life in Ireland. She has a lover, plenty of interests and opinions on virtually everything. Out of the blue, her best friend Maebh receives a letter from an American who claims to be her brother. Maebh isn't sure whether to meet him and turns to Edith for advice. This links neatly to Edith's experiences back in the 1960s when she was in her late teens. Edith's sister Lydia was a ballet dancer, in the later stages of an unplanned pregnancy. Edith was dispatched to Italy to support Lydia during the birth of her baby, then make a phone call that would determine the fate of the baby and enable Lydia to resume her career as a dancer.

Ripeness goes back and forth between the 1960s and the present day exploring many themes including rape, Middle Eastern and Ukrainian refugees, what it is to be truly Irish, abortion and Magdalene Laundries, DNA and ancestry tracing, the punishing and sometimes destructive life of a ballet dancer, Jewishness and the horrors of the Holocaust. I enjoy fiction that is built around topics relevant to today's world, arguably though, too many different themes were covered in this book.

As a teenager Edith had a certain naivety which I found captivating, however I didn't warm to the older Edith. As such, this became a book of two halves. Whilst poignant, heart-wrenching and desperately sad, I enjoyed the saga of Edith's time in Italy. Beautifully and sensitively narrated Edith's resilience shone through. However, despite these experiences and her desperate sadness at the outcome, I struggled to reconcile the teenager Edith with the opinionated older person she became. Engaging with the chapters about her life in the now was a real chore, not helped by the complete absence of speech marks.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for my advance reader copy in return for my honest and unbiased review.

THE OPENING to Ripeness is a bit of a surprise; Edith, a septuagenarian Englishwoman living in The Burren, is enjoying lively coitus with her easy-going German lover. While it may be an unconventional start to a novel, it is fitting for the recurring theme of things coming to fruition, that runs concurrently alongside things not fitting in at all.
Edith has carved out a path for herself in Clare, moving permanently to her holiday home after divorce from her Irish solicitor husband. She is quietly worldly and principled, yet unsure how to react to her friend’s growing anti-immigrant sentiment, following the depositing of a group of Ukrainian refugees to the small local hotel.
Her contented life in the Burren is quiet and simple, wanting nothing - wanting for nothing - yet she knows she is privileged to be able to choose it. She has good friends and an adult son who is growing a family of his own, as well as the German potter Gunter.
It is the conflict of opinions with her friend, and a later confidence shared by the same friend, that spurs on the recollections of her autumn spent in Italy, as a naïve teenager in the mid-1960s.
In alternating passages, Edith’s present-day life is set parallel with her time spent in the hills above Lake Como. The Italy chapters are presented in the first person, as Edith recalls her extraordinary coming-of-age trip to an initially unknown recipient, while older Edith’s story is told in the third person.
The two Ediths are worlds apart. The seventeen-year-old is about to embark on university life in Oxford, having come from a farm in the North of England. Her mother is a Jewish-French war refugee who found herself married to this English farmer for want of nothing else to do and her older sister Lydia is a ballerina.
Edith is in Italy on orders of her mother to tend to Lydia in the final stages of pregnancy. Sophisticated Lydia has been staying as lady of the manor in a villa owned by the director of the ballet and probable father of the child, along with some other members of the corps for company.
When Edith arrives, she is wearing all the wrong clothes and saying all the wrong things, but she soon finds her feet and the somewhat reserved, yet quietly intelligent girl expands her Italian as well as her worldview as the warm weeks become cooler, the days begin to shorten, and the arrival of the baby becomes imminent.
Sarah Moss is a writer with a real gift for observation and for character. Edith as a seventeen-year-old is so believable in her self-conscious innocence, eagle-eyed as to all going on around her. She becomes an adult while Lydia becomes a mother, and is monumentally changed by the experience.
This is evident from her position in County Clare, where her friend’s confidence requires her help, and inspires her introspection. The stark beauty of The Burren reminds her, by its contrast, of the vast richness of the Italian orchard in the autumn. It is not the only comparison she has to make between these two points in time.
While the issue of the protest over the refugees is only a brief part of the story – perhaps the only quibble I have with this wonderfully vivid book – it is the key that unlocks the theme of belonging. Her own refugee mother never stayed in one place for long, but eventually found a sense of home in a kibbutz in Israel.
Edith considers what right anyone has to this entitlement, thinking about her mother, as an Englishwoman in Ireland and a mother herself whose Irish son has also flown the nest to another country. She wonders about the Ukrainians, forced from their homes, and she thinks of children of adoption who have discovered their roots and finally feel a sense of a place in the world.
She wonders about community, and acceptance, expectations of people, particularly refugees and the demands on them.
Ripeness is so beautifully written and so full of thoughts and considerations that expand from the central story. It is far reaching and vital, and the questions posed to the reader requires answers from them, whether they like it or not. It is truly magnificent.

Ripeness
By Sarah Moss

I only discovered Sarah Moss in the past year or so, and have been slowly making my way through her back catalogue. Her stories are slow and deep reflections of how nurture and nature shape us, and how the trauma we experience growing up ripples through our adult lives, informing our identity and our relationship dynamics. From reading her memoir "My Good Bright Wolf" it's clear there's a rich of autofiction throughout all of her work.

This new publication might be my favourite of hers altogether. A dual timeline set in 1960s Italy, Lake Como, and a present day setting on Flaggy Shore in Co. Clare couldn't confuse even the most distracted reader. The present day timeline is told in 3rd person, of 70 something Edith, post divorce and unapologetically doing her own thing, sea swimming, yoga, having tea with Méabh, sympathising with the asylum seekers that are infuriating the local population and having a little bit of Gunther on the side.

These chapters alternate with her 17 year old self, narrating to someone you'll eventually work out, about the summer she spent at Lake Como with her sister who has been sent away to have her baby, preserving the family's dignity.

Both settings have a wonderful sense of place, and both places are interesting in terms of how moral code has evolved over the decades. Moss reaches deep into what constitutes home and belonging, and what binds more, DNA or place.

This is a beautifully told story, with powerful themes that leave the reader with more questions than answers.

Publication date: 22nd May 2025
Thanks to #Netgalley for providing an ARC fit review purposes

🍋 REVIEW 🍋

Ripeness by Sarah Moss
Release Date: 22nd May 2025

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Thank you to @netgalley and @panmacmillan for the e-ARC!

📝 - It is the 60s and, just out of school, Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy. She has been sent by her mother with strict instructions: to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth and then make a phone call which will seal this baby’s fate, and his mother’s. Decades later, happily divorced and newly energized, Edith is living a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Maebh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Maebh must decide if she will meet him, and she asks Edith for help.

💭 - Thoroughly enjoyed this one. I thought the switching between timelines worked really well, and there was a real depth of emotion and storyline in both sections, which isn’t always the case. I liked that, while the two stories had echoes of each other, it wasn’t about each being fully resolved. The writing style was definitely aligned to my taste too. I do have one key issue though; I found it troubling to have discussions of belonging/oppression/displacement etc, with many conversations around what it means to be Jewish, with zero mention of Palestine. It felt overtly missed out among the discussions of Ireland’s history and, yes, troubling to have not even been mentioned through such relevant themes.

#ripeness #sarahmoss #bookstagram #bookreviewer #bookreview #contemporaryfiction #literaryfiction #fiction #advancereaderscopy

Layered, illustrative and thought provoking story. Unusual writing style that demands the reader’s full attention.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

This was my first Sarah Moss and it won’t be my last! I really enjoyed this - her prose just sings to me.

Ripeness by Sarah Moss is a beautifully written character study of Edith. We see Edith at two different times of her life, one part is a recollection by Edith of a time when she was 17, supporting her sister, at a villa in Italy, who is expecting a baby imminently.

Edith has also retired in Ireland, following a much wanted divorce, she decides to stay in the marital holiday home. Edith is originally from England, well it depends how far back you go, her mum's hostory as a French Jew who escaped to England to avoid being rounded up.

The novel has a meandering feel, especially the portrayal of late stage pregnancy; I found this both evocative and nostalgic. The novel addresses immigration, who we are, where we come from, the impact on us and how ot colours our view of others.

Its a wonderful novel exploring important contemporary issues that actually have been contemporary for all too long. Plus the portrayal of Edith, her relationships and her solitude are all so well drawn.

I took a long time to connect with Edith, I think in part due to the dual timelines, but the pay off was worth it giving me lots to consider and a story to love.

Ripeness by Kate Moss is another beautiful book from one of the most talented authors I have encountered. As always the language is delightful, lusciously descriptive and immediately evocative, especially the nature descriptions. Set in two time periods and two countries the book follows Edith, currently a woman in her seventies living a full and satisfying life in rural Ireland as she writes a difficult but very heart felt letter to her nephew whom she hasn't seen since he was a week old baby and given up for adoption by her older sister. Edith was sent away from the farm she grew up on by her mother, to help her sister, a ballerina, in the last trimester of her pregnancy in 1960's rural Italy. It is a vastly different world for the sheltered Edith, and when the time comes she struggles hugely with her sister's decision and its consequences. Meanwhile in modern day Ireland Edith is happily divorced and living in a small town where she has built up strong friendships and relationships, but lately she is unsettled by some of the anti immigrant narrative she is seeing, especially since she is an immigrant herself. When her best friend is contacted by a man who believes himself to be her brother, adopted in America as a baby, it triggers her memories and makes her think of that time in Italy all those years before.
This is a complex and layered story that deserves to be sipped like a fine wine. The complexity of belonging is at the heart of this story and the author is unafraid to ask some difficult questions of the reader. The theme of motherhood and family is also clearly woven throughout the book, and the author again does not shy away from discussing the difficult as well as the rewarding aspects of the role.
A beautiful book to be savoured and treasured.
I read an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

Sarah Moss is one of the great chorniclers of the English - with books like Ghost Wall, Summerwater and The Fell. In her latest book Ripeness she takes a characters at two points in her life. The book opens with an ageing Edith, daughter of holocaust survivors, living in ireland but not feeling "natural" there despite a rich life. Edith understands the weight of her past and pushes against the racism of the local villagers. The narrative alternates with the past in which which a teenage Edith goes to be with her ballet dancing sister who has been sequestered in an Italian villa with some of her colleagues after been made pregnant by the company director.
Ripeness is full of the deep character work, deep themes and evocative atmostopherics that characterise Moss's work but moves a little too slowly to be truly engaging. While it is not overly long and does eventually draw some of its many threads together, Ripeness lacks some of the drive that infused into some of the earlier works listed above and so feels a little sluggish in comparison.