Ruth

The serenely weird testament of an unintentional heroine in an intentional community and an act of novelistic grace that deserves not only cult status but its own religion.

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2022

An irresistibly smart and funny novel

Jenny Offill, author of Weather, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize For Fiction

A detailed, delicate study of how character is formed by collision with so many sharp corners that they form a perfect circle – how we entrap ourselves in the choices of others, glimpsing freedom in flashes like lightning on the horizon.

Nell Zink, author of Mislaid, listed for the National Book Award

A delightful, quietly explosive, triumph of a novel, Ruth shimmers with a quiet sadness whilst being almost fiendishly playful. A marvel. I can imagine how readers of Marilynne Robinson will absolutely press it to their hearts.

Gemma Reeves, author of Mamele

Really scratches the itch of 'voyeuristic curiosity about what goes on in fundamentalist religious communities' and is also so well written that it’s freakishly astonishing that it’s a first novel. Also: funny.

New York Magazine, Emily Gould

Cheeky, inquisitive . . . A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.

Kirkus, starred review

This novel asks big questions about what kind of impositions we live according to, and what is the most likely path to happiness.

Big Issue

[Ruth’s] mischievous and capricious joy casts an afterglow on this novel like sunlight through cloud.

Daily Mail

Intimate and inviting... Riley’s arresting debut [...] rebuts more orthodox modes of storytelling and plotting, while also challenging ideas we might hold about what exactly it is that gives our lives meaning... through it all, Riley’s transcendently plain-spoken prose is imbued with what we might best describe as linguistic grace.

Daily Telegraph

There’s something arrestingly odd about Kate Riley’s debut, and not just because it’s set in America’s religious communes. Ruth has all the repressed horror one might expect, as its titular protagonist grows up in these isolated spaces (Riley herself lived in a similar commune). But at the same time, there’s acid wit and irony at play here too, which makes Riley’s central character simultaneously a passive observer and agonised, misunderstood critic.

Observer

Ruth is a granular portrait of a truly collective place that sometimes reads like a sidelong assessment of our lonely, technologically fractured time. It is also its own thing entirely… Like the best novels of everyday life, it’s strikingly ambivalent, folding in all the moral unclarity and dissatisfaction that even people who pray, sing, and labour without complaint might feel on a Tuesday morning. It’s unlike anything I’ve read in a long time.

The Cut

A generous coming-of-age story… Riley isn’t some voyeur watching a house on a summer night just after the lights come on. Instead, she puts the reader right alongside Ruth. The third-person narrative voice is Ruth’s great achievement — its constant vacillation between droll superiority and unabashed earnestness makes it hard for the reader to determine whether they know better than the characters or if, in fact, they have quite a lot to learn from them. The novel is full of Ruth’s deadpan delivery and intellectual verve.

The Atlantic

[An] assured debut... this absorbing examination of the inner life — brightened with comic touches — contains "inklings of greatness""

New York Times

Riley’s narration is calibrated to reflect her protagonist’s evolving mind. That dynamic fidelity is all the more impressive for being almost imperceptible... Her epigraphic style, informed by decades of sermons, aphorisms and comic retorts, ensures the novel’s delightful buoyancy. Ruth’s circumstances are certainly unusual, but her thwarted ambitions, her sacrifices for family and church, compose a melody as familiar as a melancholy old hymn. Riley’s ability to plumb that slip of salvation — in a way that stays true to Ruth’s life — is just one of this novel’s many graces.

Washington Post

Riley’s narrator is part wry anthropologist, part reluctant memoirist. Hers is very different from the kind of candour we have become accustomed to in contemporary fiction: it’s essentially withholding, and the emotional payoff is to be found not in the explicit excavation of trauma, but in bittersweet moments of levity and flights of whimsy

Guardian

A wonderful, loving, tenderly teasing and often moving portrait… Standout.

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Riley’s first novel fascinates with its realistic depiction of Hutterite life and beliefs and the extraordinary narration of Ruth’s rich and idiosyncratic inner life from childhood to parenthood.

Booklist

What a strange and wonderful book this is – emphasis on the strange. No, wait – emphasis on the wonderful.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Riley’s wonderful debut follows a woman at odds with the Christian commune she was born into… She never loses sight of the characters’ humanity and spiritual searching, and she adeptly explores how faith and love can be sustained. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Publishers Weekly, starred review