Kate Riley

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Riley shows us that one can find meaning and even happiness within the smallest of worlds.

Delightful… If this really is Riley’s first and last book, then she’s played a blinder.

It is all of Ruth's oddities alongside the po-faced prose of community life that make this debut a humorous triumph and Riley a refreshing new author to watch.

A LitHub most anticipated book of 2025 
 
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

Praise for 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 ...

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: f ...

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

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 ...

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: f ...

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

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 ...

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: f ...

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

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