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Ruth

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About this listen

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

 Christian Fiction Coming of Age Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction Happiness

Critic reviews

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.
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.
[Ruth’s] mischievous and capricious joy casts an afterglow on this novel like sunlight through cloud.
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.
An irresistibly smart and funny novel
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.
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.
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.
This novel asks big questions about what kind of impositions we live according to, and what is the most likely path to happiness.
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.
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.
All stars
Most relevant
Such a beautiful and thoughtful book, I laughed out loud repeatedly, left me with lots to consider, and perfect prose.

Thoughtful, funny, beautifully sparing

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