Ruth

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 *
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... 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… Riley’s great trick is to tap into the anodyne, to make Ruth a woman whose concerns … are essentially universal. * The Atlantic *
There are inklings of greatness in Kate Riley’s first novel, ‘Ruth.’ It claims a place on that high modern shelf next to the offbeat books of Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman and Nell Zink — those possessors of wrinkled comic sensibilities rooted in pain… I suspect it will become an underground classic. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *
The author’s wry voice never flattens the meringue tips of Ruth’s childlike wonder. And later, as Ruth feels increasingly cramped in the little church, Riley maintains ironic distance, careful to avoid collapsing into the character inspired by her own experience. Her epigraphic style, informed by decades of sermons, aphorisms and comic retorts, ensures the novel’s delightful buoyancy… 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. -- Ron Charles * 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 *
Riley shows us that one can find meaning and even happiness within the smallest of worlds. * Literary Review *
Delightful… If this really is Riley’s first and last book, then she’s played a blinder. * Spectator *
It is all of Ruth's oddities alongside the po-faced prose of community life that make this debut ahumorous triumph and Riley a refreshing new author to watch. * Big Issue *
Ruth is a touching tale of a radical experiment in living which, while it limits individual expression and agency, nevertheless offers much that is comforting in return. Riley's deft prose has surprising angles and hidden spikes. * Financial Times *