Ripeness

A Novel

De: Sarah Moss

Narrado por: Flora Montgomery

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2025 Sarah Moss (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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

Disappointing novel from a great writer

I’m a huge admirer of Sarah Moss. The first work of hers I read was Ghost Wall, and the last was My Good Bright Wolf, and both blew me away. I’ll try to remember that when I hesitate to pick up her next one. Ripeness is mostly beautifully written (though often overwritten). But it largely comprises scenes of musing on identity and global injustice and trauma, and none of it feels particularly complex or new if you’re someone who has spent time thinking about these things. The conversations characters have around Irish history and trauma read as scripted and unbelievable. People don’t spell out the contours of a historical trauma every time they begin a conversation about it. And we leap from this trauma to that trauma, as if the goal is to jam them all in, even as the reader is reeling from having to imagine each experience. Maybe I’m missing an artistic point here, but I found this extremely frustrating. For the first time with a book by Moss, I felt I wasn’t learning much of anything, nor being taken on a journey.
I’ll stick with her, though, because she is a brilliant artist.