Ripeness
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
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.
Ripeness is an extraordinary novel about familial love and the communities we create, about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Moss's layered and poignant latest (after the memoir My Good Bright Wolf), an aging divorced Englishwoman reflects on the nature of home and family while living in Ireland. Edith enjoys a casual relationship with a German potter and a fulfilling friendship with long-married local woman Maebh in County Clare. Edith's story is informed by alternating flashbacks to the mid-1960s, when she comes of age in northern England and is dispatched by her mother, a WWII refugee from France, to assist her older sister, Lydia, a professional ballerina, who is about to give birth in rural Italy. With the paternal details of Lydia's pregnancy shrouded in secrecy, Edith busies herself with Lydia's physical and emotional care as she vows to give the baby up for adoption. In the present day, Meabh receives a letter from an American man claiming to be her half brother, but is ambivalent about inviting him to visit. Meanwhile, Edith rues the man's claim on a land to which he's never been while she eternally feels like a "stranger," especially given the rising anti-refugee sentiment. Moss's characters are delightfully complex, giving shape to the narrative's meditation on belonging. This leaves readers with much to chew on.
