All The Mothers
Published by Penguin Random House. On Sale May 6, 2025.
Sandy thought she was making her greatest mistake yet when she got unexpectedly pregnant in her mid-thirties by a dating-app flop. Now, her baby Rosie is the love of her life, but trying to co-parent with her daughter’s dad, a wannabe rock star, is a challenge—and seems to be veering into catastrophe territory when Sandy finds out through social media that her daughter has a half-sibling Sandy doesn’t know anything about.
Enter her ex’s ex, Stephanie, the other mother. Sandy is prepared to hate her but when the two women meet, they are shocked to learn how much they have in common beyond the deadbeat father their children share. Now Sandy needs to figure out what her and Rosie’s family looks like with all these new additions. Could life in a “mommune” be the answer to her prayers, or just a new brand of chaos?
In this winning story of family both born and chosen, Sandy is about to discover that when nothing goes as planned, the best things become possible.
“A funny, heartfelt meditation on the many definitions of family.”
Swan Huntley,
author of I Want You More
Praise for All The Mothers
“A perfectly charming and complex ode to mothers and found families . . . The real marvel is the beautifully drawn characters, who are realized with tremendous depth. Ruta skillfully sketches the complexities and struggles of single motherhood, especially as it relates to financial precarity and the importance of cultivating joy and community.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A delight, a romp, a tale of redemption; sexy and relatable, heartwarming and true . . . This story will resound as a rallying cry for mothers everywhere for generations to come.”
Chelsea Bieker,
author of Madwoman
“All the Mothers is a wickedly funny, wildly entertaining, and deeply felt novel about motherhood, money, and making a happy home beyond the borders of convention. You won’t be able to put this one down.”
Leigh Stein,
author of Self Care
“A timely hymn to female friendship and platonic love, this spicy story about Baby Mamas becoming Alpha matriarchs was so funny, tender and necessary, I couldn’t put it down.”
Courtney Maum,
author of The Year of the Horses
“Warm, funny, and absolutely right, All the Mothers is a novel about my favorite kind of family: complicated. Domenica Ruta’s intimately-sketched characters are impressively messy, familiar, beguiling, formidable, maddening, heartbreaking, and life affirming . . . sometimes all in the same morning.”
Laurie Frankel,
author of Family Family
“With tremendous humor, intelligence, wisdom, and, of course, heart, Ruta takes a hard, unflinching look at exactly what it takes to survive in America as a single mother. The result is a defining novel for these turbulent times.”
Joanna Rakoff,
author of My Salinger Year
“All the Mothers beautifully captures the struggles and—more crucially—the myriad unexpected joys of raising children and creating community with the people who show up, whoever they may be. Domenica Ruta brings such much-needed joy and humor to the subject of motherhood that I want to press this book into the hands of every parent I know.”
Jessie Gaynor,
author of The Glow
Last Day
Published by Spiegel & Grau
In this profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet’s demise - and celebrate as if the day is truly their last. On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. With the heart-wrenching wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Domenica Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears. In this tour-de-force debut novel, she has written a dazzling, haunting love letter to humanity and to our planet.
Praise for Last Day
“Darkly glittering...the novel ignites.”
New York Times Book Review
“A beautifully written, thought-provoking book about life at the end.”
Refinery 29
“After making a splash with her memoir, With or Without You (2013), Ruta returns with an inventive first novel. Ruta imagines that people have been observing Last Day on May 28th for centuries, coming together to celebrate life on Earth as though it might all end at any moment…. an entertaining and clever speculative tale.”
Booklist
“Ruta delicately sketches the large cast of characters—as well as their dreams, fears, and failures—with care. She's able to pinpoint certain universal feelings with precision… A beautiful portrait of humanity in the shadow of a dying Earth.”
Kirkus
“LAST DAY is a galaxy unto itself, a profound and incisive slice of our world on the edge of its inevitable end from a brilliant voice in American fiction.”
Amelia Gray,
author of Isadora
“Mesmerizing. Last Day held me so powerfully in its orbit that I read it in one night. In Ruta's brilliant, large-hearted, and all-too-plausible debut, people prepare for an inevitable end-of-days by practicing a ritualistic annual apocalypse "holiday." On Last Day, totems are burned in bonfires, amends are made, sojourns taken, and at a storied Boston tattoo parlor, patrons get inked for free. This earth, like ours, is populated with beautifully flawed characters who are proficient at destroying--and resurrecting--their own lives, with or without the aid of a large-scale natural calamity.Each stunning sentence reminded me of all I love about our earth, and all that would be lost on a real Last Day. I'll be thinking of this novel for a very long time.”
Alena Graedon,
author of The Word Exchange
With or Without You
Published by Penguin Random House, NYT Bestseller
With or Without You is the story of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional coming of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a misfit ’90s youth and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the process. In a brilliant stylistic feat, Ruta has written a powerful, inspiring, compulsively readable, and finally redemptive story about loving and leaving.
We Got This
Domenica Ruta is a co-editor of the award-winning anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Heart, Grit, and Humor.
