Miriam comes from a German-flavored utopian commune where dating is forbidden and the Sewing Sisters decide who can wear what kind of ugly plaid. Is beauty a sin? Is oddity? Will she ever get married? A pulsing literary debut about a woman born into an anabaptist community, whose life we follow from childhood to middle age.
MIRIAM
by Kate Riley
Riverhead, Fall 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
Kate Riley wrote MIRIAM about eight years ago as a series of micro-dispatches (on an iPod Touch) to her heroically patient, encouraging friend, Molly Young (also The New York Times book critic), who helped her wrestle it into its sublime final shape. Molly has been intending to publish it in an edition of a few hundred lovingly designed copies, to be circulated by supportive, awed friends among would-be enthusiasts, one whom catchily volunteered to send an early blurb:
“The Biblical Books of Ruth and Esther have found their American sister-wife in Miriam, the serenely weird testament of an unintentional heroine in an intentional community, and an act of novelistic grace that deserves more than cult status, but its own goddamned religion.” —Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus, 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
This said rare edition is now available, and Riverhead will publish their hardcover edition Fall 2024. A selection of the novel has also appeared in n+1 in 2017 and another excerpt is featured in the last issue of The Paris Review.
Kate Riley was born in New York City and now lives in rural Virginia on a farm with her husband.

Black army veteran named Buddy Ray Guy is a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love. He moves around the south, having several women across different states. He recalls his love affairs in post-war France, both in the provinces and in Paris, as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities.
Screenwriter Molly Marks is a love cynic, despite the fact that she writes rom-com screenplays for a living. She thought ghosting her high school boyfriend, Seth, was the end of her chance at love—until a 15-year reunion sets something in motion that some would call fate—but absolutely not Molly Marks.
San Francisco. Robyn, a young and ambitious journalist, is shocked when the police show up on her doorstep. Her ex-boyfriend Julian has been reported missing. At a single stroke, the past comes flooding back: the longing, the pain, the disappointment… Robyn thought she had put it all behind her. She’s deeply worried about Julian. What could have happened? Robyn seeks help from her best friend, Cooper – though she has long felt much more for him than that. When the police suspect Cooper of having something to do with Julian’s disappearance, she doesn’t know what to believe, or what to feel. Who can she trust? Can she even trust herself?