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 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