Ruth

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning she braids her hair and wears the same costume, sings the same breakfast song in a family room identical to every other family room in the community; every one of these moments is meant to be a prayer, but to Ruth they remain puzzles. Her life is seen in glimpses through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, as she tries to manage her own perilous curiosity in a community built on holy mystery. Is she happy? Might this in fact be happiness? Ruth immerses us in an experience that challenges our most fervent beliefs.

© Kate Riley 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

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
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
[Ruth’s] mischievous and capricious joy casts an afterglow on this novel like sunlight through cloud.
Daily Mail
Cheeky, inquisitive, and a delightful pain in the neck, Ruth carries the novel with aplomb... A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.
Kirkus, starred review
An irresistibly smart and funny novel
Jenny Offill, author of Weather, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize For Fiction
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
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
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
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
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

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