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Irish Times
28-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Irish Times
Ripeness by Sarah Moss: A captivating novel about the unwritten codes of Irish social interaction
Ripeness Author : Sarah Moss ISBN-13 : 978-1529035490 Publisher : Picador Guideline Price : £20 Have you no homes to go to? The line once used by Irish bar staff to clear a crowded pub at the end of an evening has a more unsettling ring in the modern age. What if you have no home to go to? What if you are not overly keen on going home? What if 'home' gets defined by someone else and not by you? Sarah Moss's latest novel, Ripeness, is, among other things, an extended meditation on what home or belonging might mean in a period of disruption and displacement. The narrative shifts between 73-year-old Edith, who has settled in the Burren, and her 17-year-old self, who ends up in a villa near Lake Como dealing with her sister Lydie's unwanted pregnancy. Edith and Lydie are the daughters of a French Jewish mother married to a northern English farmer. Edith inherits from her father an acute sensitivity to the changing moods of the landscape and from her mother – lost in the aftershadow of the Holocaust – an innate scepticism about the permanence of any form of belonging. Moss perfectly judges the prickly absolutism of the younger Edith, on her way to Oxford, a bookish teenager dealing with events in a foreign land that fast-track her to adulthood. Some of the most affecting pages in the novel describe the burgeoning sense of care she feels for her newborn nephew in the days before he is taken away for adoption, the carefully orchestrated outcome of the catastrophic circumstances surrounding his conception. READ MORE The older Edith memorably combines a clear-sighted forthrightness with the sarky petulance of advancing years ('we had a wireless at home but no record player, none of us feeling a need for music. It was only later that everyone started to have a taste in music, as if it were food or clothes, no opting out'). As an English woman in Ireland, Edith is continually aware of the trip wires of reproach, the random observation that is chalked up to colonial condescension or the accent that potentially makes any critical comment a hostage to the high-horsiness of empire. Forty years of married life in south Dublin and her subsequent move to the west of Ireland make for a long apprenticeship in the unwritten codes of Irish social interaction, where she notes 'friendliness isn't friendship'. Continually navigating the uncertainty of home and belonging is, as Sarah Moss's beguiling tale reminds us, an important skill Edith's northern English plain-speaking continually runs aground on the island shores of the unsaid and the unspoken. Questions around assimilation and integration come to a head when Méabh, Edith's closest friend, becomes involved in a local protest against the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers. This event coincides with the imminent reunion between Méabh and a newly discovered half-brother from the United States, another victim of an unwanted teenage pregnancy, having many years earlier been spirited off to the US for adoption. Edith contrasts the ready acceptance of the half-brother – who has never set foot in Ireland – as being of the place, with the rejection of the young asylum seekers – who actually live on the island – as having no right to be there. [ Sarah Moss: Irish dog-walkers are kinder than English dog-walkers Opens in new window ] Lying in bed with her German lover, Gunter, she wants 'another immigrant to agree that national identity isn't genetic, that blood doesn't give you rights of ownership'. To an ageing Edith, the malign legacies of blood-and-soil thinking are evidence not only of the dangers of forgetting but also of the foreclosure of possibility, the denial that newcomers have the regenerative capacity to 'belong by caring for people and places'. Moss's writing has always been characterised by its range, and the latest novel does not disappoint. Whether describing the shift of the northern Italian landscape from summer to autumn, the granular changes of light on a wet day in Clare, or the brittle exchanges between two damaged siblings, Moss's prose is unfailingly spare and alert. The images are often arresting: 'a bowl of brassy dimpled pears'. Equally, they are telling in their unfussy accuracy, such as when she evokes spring in the Burren, 'its tiny flowering in the crevices and rain-cups of sedimentary rock, in the pinprick markings of the planet's bone'. Part of the attraction of this captivating novel is Moss's curiosity about different ways of knowing. How the world looks through the lens of a different language – French or Italian, in this instance – and how you try to build another version of yourself in that language while foxed by the snares of grammar and idiom. Or how differently the world is felt and understood when it is measured out in steps, twists, turns and leaps, as is the case with Lydie and her ballet-dancer friends. The ripeness of the title comes from Edith's reading of King Lear . She contrasts Hamlet's insistence on readiness, on the triumph of the will, with Edgar's 'ripeness is all', which stresses how much is out of our hands, how much happens 'regardless of agency or volition'. Continually navigating the uncertainty of home and belonging is, as Sarah Moss's beguiling tale reminds us, an important skill if, in our fractious age, last orders are not to give way to last rites. Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ripeness by Sarah Moss – a beautifully written novel of place and identity
Sarah Moss's post-Brexit novels, Ghost Wall, Summerwater and The Fell, have dealt centrally with the anxieties and hostilities of the white working and middle classes in contemporary Britain. This trio of short, vivid works has also quietly established Moss as a revered chronicler of the political present. Though Ripeness bears many of the hallmarks of her recent fiction – evocative descriptions of the natural world abound, no speech marks used, chapter titles plucked suggestively out of the narrative – it also departs from it. It is longer, slower, European in setting, and its political critiques are ultimately muted. Ripeness is structured in alternating narrative strands, both following an English woman called Edith: one as a septuagenarian living comfortably in the west of Ireland in the post-pandemic present, and another as a bookish, Oxford-bound 17-year-old travelling to Italy in the late 60s. These strands are initially connected by stories of babies given up. In the present, Edith's best friend Méabh is contacted by an unknown older brother who was adopted and raised in America and now wants to 'see where he comes from'. In the historical strand, Edith is travelling to help her older sister, a professional ballerina, pregnant with a child she will almost immediately relinquish. Together, a textured and affecting story about place and identity emerges. Early on we learn that Edith has four passports – English, Irish, French and Israeli – and that her French-Jewish mother was granted refuge in England in 1941 while her grandparents and aunt were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Edith's 'Maman', an artist and 'iconoclast' to her friends in rural Derbyshire, advised her to always 'leave before you're certain, because if you wait until you know, there are boots coming up the stairs and blood on the walls'. While her mother's migration was driven by genocide and trauma, and her grandparents before had fled Ukraine for France, she and her sister were able to travel freely around Europe, and the young Edith's only real concern was that 'the rising hemlines of the mid-60s had not reached the thigh of Italy'. But in the novel's present, military aggression is again forcing migration. Edith reflects on the cyclical nature of conflict, noting that the 'great grandparents of the people now fleeing Russian invasion and taking refuge here in the west of Ireland were the aggressors from whom her great-grandparents fled Ukraine'. A central tension is established when Edith discovers that while Méabh is sympathetic to their village's Ukrainian refugees, she is actively protesting at the use of a local hotel as emergency housing for African refugees. Edith is sickened and wonders briefly if she can remain friends with 'someone who thinks the problem is refugees'. Quickly she decides she can, though Méabh's position continues to trouble her. She supports her plans to meet her brother, but stews over her own belief that 'national identity isn't genetic, that blood doesn't give you rights of ownership', that 'Méabh's brother can't just come here and call it home, say he belongs, when nothing the Ukrainians do will ever entitle them to say such things, when the lads at the hotel aren't even allowed the air they breathe'. These convictions are not unconsidered, and Edith gives much thought to various claims to and erasures of identity – including the Jewishness of her unknown nephew, adopted by nuns, and her Maman's traumatic experiences of loss and migration. Yet, despite her personal connection to histories of genocide and displacement, her dismay at Méabh's position fades. Edith's convictions about 'blood and soil' logic are betrayed by her lack of reproach to Méabh, and the novel's shifts in narrative perspective allow us to view her critically. The chapters depicting the present are narrated in the third person, while those depicting Edith's trip to Italy are in the first person. While the latter invite us to see the world through her eyes, the former allow some detachment between Edith and the reader and emphasise her privilege, biases and uncertainties. Edith is also increasingly reflexive and self-deprecating, eventually describing herself as having 'remained more of narrator than a participant'. This evocative distinction between storytelling and action aligns with the novel's dual narrative, which both connects us to and distances us from this compelling and at times frustrating character. However, because of her increasing self-deprecation and reflection, and at least partial awareness of her mistakes, Edith is ultimately presented as sympathetic. Her flaws are human and relatable and by its conclusion, the gap that has opened between the novel's politics and its protagonist's views has shrunk. Just as Edith's dismay at Méabh's comments fades, the anger of Ripeness wanes too. But while its critiques of contemporary attitudes towards migration, and failures in historical thinking, and the ways some refugees are accepted while others are not, do lose some force, it remains a powerful and beautifully written story of family, friendship and identity. Ripeness by Sarah Moss is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Nostalgia and longing in the best literary fiction out now: RIPENESS by Sarah Moss, LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY by Elaine Feeney, WHERE SNOWBIRDS PLAY by Gina Goldhammer
Ripeness by Sarah Moss is available now from the Mail Bookshop RIPENESS by Sarah Moss (Picador £20, 304pp) BACK in the 1960s, Oxford bound teenager Edith was dispatched to idyllic rural Lombardy to look after her elder sister Lydia, a ballet dancer in the final stages of an unplanned pregnancy. In the present day, seventy something Edith is living comfortably on the wet west coast of Ireland, enjoying an on-off dalliance with a German potter. As one strand of Moss's typically beautifully-crafted novel follows the ripening Italian summer, Lydia's pregnancy and her adamantine intention to give the baby away, the other follows Edith in the autumn of her life, as she reflects on mortality and the state of the world she'll leave behind. Above all, it's a meditation on belonging: Edith's own Jewish mother, who lost her family to the Holocaust and found peace in a kibbutz; the Ukrainian 'Good Refugees' who are welcomed by Edith's Irish neighbours; the African asylum seekers who are greeted with protests. As an outsider herself, Edith is well placed to observe it all, to thoroughly absorbing and moving effect. LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker £16.99, 320pp) THIS hugely powerful third novel from the Booker-longlisted Feeney ostensibly follows university lecturer Claire in the wake of her victimised mother and tyrannical father's deaths. Blowing up her relationship with her solicitous boyfriend, she returns from London to the family home in Ireland, a place that, as the novel unfolds, we realise has been the scene of unspeakable horrors during the Irish War of Independence. It's only in the later stages of the novel that the two timelines coalesce, as Feeney excavates the overlapping oppression and violence of colonialism and patriarchy from a typically left-field angle. Questions of revolution, restitution and, perhaps, resolution swirl in the unsettled mix of this visceral, stimulating tale that is likely one of the most original you'll read this year. WHERE SNOWBIRDS PLAY by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press £9.79, 264pp) THE author's own backstory here is every bit a match for her exotic plot, and in part its inspiration. A longtime personal assistant to Henry Kissinger, she was also caught up in the same 2000s insider trading scandal that embroiled US TV personality Martha Stewart. The backdrop is Palm Beach in the 1990s, a world of 'sculpted faces, sham marriages and designer-decorated homes'. Hannah and Philip are both English incomers, but only Oxford marine biologist Philip knows the shady family connection linking him to Hannah's disabled son. The glossily privileged milieu is sharply drawn, but elsewhere the execution is wanting, with slow-to-arrive intrigues out of focus and an ultimate descent into pure melodrama.
Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The glorious tension of Sarah Moss's novels
Sarah Moss is a master of the ticking clock. Her novels thrum with tension, building towards a dramatic climax. In Ghost Wall (2018) a teenage girl is dragged along by her father to a historical re-enactment camp to live like Iron Age Britons. But that doesn't include the sacrificial rituals, right? Then came Summerwater in 2020, set in a perpetually rainy Scottish cabin park where families and lovers attempt to make it through their respective holidays. The ending, when it comes, is explosive. The Fell (2021) had a woman escape the Covid lockdown for a hike gone terribly wrong. The premise of Moss's latest novel, Ripeness, is equally promising. In the 1960s 18-year-old Edith is sent away from the family home in England to
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss audiobook review – a life shaped by anorexia and literature
A haunting exploration of a life shaped by literature and anorexia, The Fell author Sarah Moss's memoir is told in the second person, as if the present-day Moss is directly addressing her past self. During her 1970s childhood, when every adult woman she knows is on a diet, Moss absorbs the message that she must be smart but quiet and amenable; she must be pretty and sylph-like but should never appear vain. Threaded through the narrative are the books of her formative years, by Arthur Ransome, Louisa May Alcott, Sylvia Plath and the Brontës, in which Moss is alert to depictions of women and femininity (her reading was done in secret, since her parents regarded it as a sign of indolence). Moss begins to see her body as a battleground, something over which she must exert control and power. This leads her to obsessively count calories, decline cake at birthday parties (for which she is often congratulated) and, eventually, stop eating altogether. The Scottish actor Morven Christie is the narrator: her reading is measured and reflective, drawing out the forlorn beauty of Moss's prose. She also inhabits the brutality of the author's inner voices, which berate her when they suspect her of disingenuousness or self-pity and hiss at her: 'Shut up, no one cares.' An eventual diagnosis of anorexia is followed by the prescribed treatment: an instruction to eat more and drink four glasses of milk a day. Little wonder Moss's illness follows her into adulthood, coming to a head during the pandemic where she becomes severely malnourished and a doctor warns her: 'If we do not feed you now, you will die.' Available via Picador, 8hr 28min A Death in the ParishThe Rev Richard Coles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 8hr 25minThe kindly sleuth Canon Daniel Clement investigates another murder in the not-so-sleepy village of Champton. Read by the author. A Woman Like MeDiane Abbott, Penguin Audio, 13hr 27minWestminster's mother of the House reads her memoir charting her path to becoming Britain's first Black female MP, and the personal and political struggles that followed.
