Paperback

​Sarah Moss is a hugely admired writer, and this is her greatest achievement to date. Ripeness is a sublimely moving experience which will stay with you long after you’ve closed the book. 

Edith, a teenage girl in the 1960s, is despatched to rural Italy by her mother in order to assist her older sister, Lydia, a ballet dancer, who is in the final weeks of her pregnancy. Edith walks into a sort of artistic boho idyll, where the artists play and rehearse, cocooned by privilege and their own sense of self-entitlement. The older sister Lydia is the most assured and entitled of them all.

Meanwhile, we switch to the modern day where Edith, in her late sixties, is living a relatively contented life in Ireland. She is grounded, self-aware, politically astute, although weighted with a feeling of unbelonging. When Edith’s best friend, Maebh, receives a communication from a man who claims to be her brother, this event is a catalyst for new questions and uncertainties.

And so, we have a compelling twin-track narrative, oscillating between the two time periods, each lending context to one another.

The weft and weave of Moss's prose is controlled, masterful and beautiful – her tangents are delightful, the interior monologues of Edith are a joy to witness, a privilege to share.

Sarah Moss’s writing illuminates the profundity of quiet everyday moments in life.

Well-known for his brilliantly researched, quirky and humorous books, often with France and the French as the focus, Graham Robb has turned his sights on Britain.

We are treated in these pages to a thoroughly entertaining, occasionally astonishing, and always intriguing portrait of Britain through the ages.

From regional accents to punting down the Thames and from the education system to medieval riots, Robb provides much to savour in this portrait of the British nation, taking a sort of tapestry of anecdotes approach to history. We learn, we observe and we smile along with our good-natured guide.