Sarah Moss’s new novel, Ripeness, opens with an affirmation. ‘Yes,’ says Edith. ‘Yes, yes.’ She could have said oui in her mother’s tongue or ja for the German man on top of her, but she chooses English. Seventy-three-year-old Edith thinks a lot about language, about home, national identity and belonging. Born in Derbyshire to an English farmer father and a flighty French Jewish mother (whose own mother and sister died in Belsen), she married a nice Irishman and settled in Dublin. When, following her divorce, she moves west to a cottage in County Clare on the ‘wet coast of a wet North Atlantic island off a bigger wet North Atlantic island’, her friend Méabh says, ‘ah sure, you’ve come home, girl, you were always meant to be here.’ Perhaps.

The chapters of Ripeness alternate between a close third-person narrative describing Edith’s life in County Clare during the spring of 2023 and a first-­person account of a teenage sojourn at a villa near Lake Como in the summer of 1967. In the latter, Moss delicately peels back the layers of Edith’s life to reveal the myriad reasons she thinks so much about who gets to belong where. Fresh from finishing her school exams and, much to the bemusement of her paternal grandmother, planning to take up a place at Oxford, teenage Edith goes by train to Italy to act as a companion for Lydia, her pregnant sister. Lydia is a ballerina; when Edith arrives, the villa, which belongs to the company’s director, is full of pliéing, jetéing dancers. They are elegance personified. Edith is ‘grubby and crumpled, skirt too short, worn shoes’. 

Quickly, Edith falls into a rhythm, going for long walks in the surrounding hills, helping the disapproving housekeeper when she is permitted to, eating ‘plump oranges’ and ‘figs still warm from the tree’, swimming in the villa’s pool. She washes in a marble bathtub that reminds her ‘of the