Ripeness A novel

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. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Sept.)

An elderly British emigrant in the west of Ireland narrates the birth of her nephew more than 50 years earlier. Edith, a woman in her early 70s, has made an enviable life for herself in County Clare. She lives alone in a cottage there, financially secure after getting divorced and selling property near Dublin. She has a lover and a cadre of friends, including Méabh, a local with whom Edith has found a deep rapport. And she's found an even deeper rapport with Ireland itself, though she hails from a farm in Derbyshire in the north of England, raised by her farmer father and her "glamorous" French Jewish mother, whose own parents and sister were sent to Belsen during the war. Edith's status as an outsider in Ireland means she has "learnt, as immigrants do…by keeping quiet, standing back, observing." This sense of life on the periphery also connects her in memory to her past when, on the brink of attending Oxford, a 17-year-old Edith is sent to stay at a villa near Lake Como with her older sister, a ballerina. Elegant and cosmopolitan like their mother, Lydia is everything cerebral Edith feels she isn't. Lydia is also eight months pregnant and opaque about the baby's paternity, determined to give the baby up for adoption and return to her demanding life as a dancer. Moss switches back and forth between Edith's present, told in close third person, and the past, told in first person and addressed to the baby that Edith and her sister await. Through these parallel narratives, and with her characteristically sinuous style, Moss is able to explore the idea of belonging: What does it mean to belong to a place? To a lineage? A family? A home? Moss directs her keen and graceful sensibility toward modern-day Ireland and 1960s Italy with equal aplomb. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.