The Sweetest Fruits

THE SWEETEST FRUITS: A NOVEL
By Monique Truong
9780999451441
$24 (SGD) / Paperback / 5.5 x 8.5 / 310 pages
Gaudy Boy, May 18, 2021
Singapore and Malaysia: In the best bookstores
Distributed by Word Image

With a new afterword by the author

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
2020 John Gardner Fiction Book Award Winner
A Mental Floss and PopMatters Best Books of 2019
A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Books of 2019

About

With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, The Sweetest Fruits circumnavigates the globe, introducing three unforgettable women, separated by geography and culture but connected by their love for the Greek-Irish author Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904). Excluded from history’s dominant patriarchal narratives but with their own powerful stories to tell, they share their intrepid tales of crossing borders, languages, and social norms in pursuit of love, family, home, and belonging. This edition comes with a new afterword by the author.

Three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, tell the story of their lives with Lafcadio Hearn, a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo, best known as the globetrotting author of America’s first Creole cookbook and his volumes about the folklore and ghost stories of Meiji-Era Japan. An immigrant thrice over, now remembered as a keen cultural observer at best, and a purveyor of exotica at worst, Hearn was a remarkable but conflicted man who surrounded himself with women wanderers who were also engaging storytellers.

Rosa Antonia Cassimati, a woman of the Ionian Islands, wills herself out of her father’s cloistered house, marries a British Army officer, and in 1852 comes to Ireland with her two-year-old son, Hearn, only to leave without him soon after. Alethea Foley, born into slavery on a Kentucky plantation, works as a boardinghouse cook in Cincinnati, Ohio, after the Civil War, where in 1872 she meets and later marries Hearn, an up-and-coming newspaper reporter. In Matsue, Japan, in 1891, Koizumi Setsu, a former samurai’s daughter, is introduced to the “New Foreign Teacher,” Hearn, and despite their initial lack of a common language, becomes the mother of his four children and his unsung literary collaborator.

More than just mothers and wives, these trailblazing traveler-explorers witness Hearn’s remarkable life, while also giving testimony to their own displaced existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each with their own precise reasons for telling their stories, the women, together, offer a revealing, often contradictory portrait of Hearn.

The Sweetest Fruits is a graceful excavation of their hidden narratives, which tell infinitely more than their love for one man.

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), in 1968, Monique Truong came
to the US as a refugee in 1975. She is based now in Brooklyn, New York. Her novels are the bestselling The Book of Salt (2003) and the award-winning Bitter in the Mouth (2010). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, O magazine, Real Simple, Food & Wine, and Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, among others. Truong is also a lyricist and librettist, working in collaboration with composers Joan La Barbara and Shih-Hui Chen.

Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Hodder Fellowship, she has taught fiction writing at Columbia School of the Arts, Princeton, and Baruch College as the Sidney Harman writer-in-residence. She received her BA in Literature from Yale University and her JD from Columbia Law School.

Praise

“A marvelous mixture of fact and imagination . . . Truong’s lush style is on gorgeous display in these pages, her imagery evoking hidden emotional depths. . . . While the lives, loves, and adventures of Lafcadio Hearn hold center stage in this novel, these are set off by a rich brocade of social critiques—of slavery, colonization, and the repression of women. With great generosity and compassion, Truong explores the difference between writing and telling stories, with the question of who gets to speak and who remains silent.”
—Diana Abu-Jaber, The Washington Post

“A delicate, impressionistic tale . . . Truong is exploring personal memory in all its creative and contradictory subjectivity. . . . [The Sweetest Fruits] is propelled not by action but by the retrospective piecing together that happens once a relationship is over. Spurred by nostalgia, regret, longing, and anger, each woman examines her memories. . . . As Setsu observes, ‘to tell another’s story is to bring him to life,’ but here it’s the women who achieve that feat rather than the man who connected them.”
—Priya Parmar, The New York Times Book Review

“It isn’t only the fantastic Lafcadio Hearn who springs to new life in these pages. The women around him do as well, even as they mix the extraordinary and the ordinary in an exhilarating new way. The Sweetest Fruits is brilliant and heartbreaking—I was transfixed.”
—Gish Jen, author of Typical American

“I’ve been addicted to Truong’s writing ever since her debut, The Book of Salt, a work of historical fiction incorporating real people that felt—unlike much of that genre—lush, invigorating, and real. Her third novel fictionalizes Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn but through the eyes of only his mother and his two wives—one a freed American slave, the other his Japanese translator.”
—Boris Kachka, New York Magazine

“Monique Truong has composed a sublime, many-voiced novel of voyage and reinvention. It will cross horizons, yet remain burrowed in your heart.”
—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Truong’s innovative narration gives us the stories of three incredible women right at the moments those stories are being repurposed or lost. Even more importantly, it shows us those erasures in process. . . . Truong’s genius for finding joy and life amidst trauma and dislocation ensures that the novel she germinated from the traces left by Patrick Lafcadio Hearn is filled with plenty and sweetness, too. In The Sweetest Fruits, even fragmented and forgotten stories offer sustenance. And in nourishing them it nourishes us.”
—Leila Mansouri, The Believer

“Monique Truong’s nomadic tale is a look at the storied life of nineteenth-century writer and expeditionist Lafcadio Hearn through the eyes of the women who knew him best. Sweeping in scope and written in tight, precise language, it’s a read-into-the-night pick.”
—Marie Claire

“Intimate and sensuous yet majestic in scope, The Sweetest Fruits is a rapturous, glorious novel, extraordinarily alive to the world.”
—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“Mesmerizing . . . Truong focuses on the mostly neglected women in Hearn’s life, imagining the struggles and sorrows of his mother, and, looking at him through the eyes of his two wives, imparts searing counterpoints to the iconic Hearn. . . . In going beyond the knowable and guiding us through the imaginable, Truong takes the measure of the man through his women in coruscating prose.”
—Jeff Kingston, Los Angeles Review of Books

“[A] sparkling, imaginative historical novel.”
—John Timpane, The Philadelphia Enquirer (Fall 2019 Biggest Books)

“In The Sweetest Fruits, Monique Truong does what she does best, painting a vivid portrait of privilege, restlessness, and tenacity through the conflicting experiences of characters grappling with their senses of love, family, and home.”
—Kevin Chau, Literary Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2019)

“This novel is not Lafcadio Hearn’s, but rather it belongs to the women of his life, who again are living and breathing, thanks to Truong . . . [she] allows each woman to speak her mind, and words are freed after years of being silently bound. . . . Thanks to Truong’s perfect rendering of their voices, justice has finally spoken and those women’s voices find both life and peace.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“In this globetrotting, luminous novel, the three narrators offer an honest, contradictory portrait of the man they knew that highlights the social expectations of their gender, race, and class for their time. Like [Truong’s] first novel, The Book of Salt, The Sweetest Fruits leads readers [into] a sweeping narrative that poses questions about belonging, existence, and storytelling.”
—Kate Gavino, The Millions (Most Anticipated: the Great Second-Half 2019 Book Preview)

“By ‘telling it slant,’ Monique Truong brings to life brave, spirited women left out of a history that privileges what Toni Morrison called ‘the master narrative.’ In doing so, she humanizes rather than diminishes Hearn. Through disparate, often contradictory narratives, she invites further investigation.”
—Renee H. Shea, World Literature Today

“An absolutely brilliant intersection of fiction and history, politics and culture, love and loss.”
—Hyphen Magazine

“[A] meditation on the vagaries of identity, the malleability of memory, and the question of whose stories are heard and whose are silenced. It is a measure of Truong’s imaginative empathy and stylistic suppleness that she has created three vivid and distinct voices.”
—Tess Lewis, The Arts Fuse

“For anyone whose life feels overshadowed by a more powerful figure, or even just not centered at any point in life for reasons beyond one’s control, reading [The Sweetest Fruits] can be a vindicating experience.”
—Rei Magosaki, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The novel empathetically imagines the circumstances of these forgotten women, so influential and supportive of Hearn. Yet the truest kinship lies between author Truong and Hearn himself, both segueing between vastly different cultures, making the common humanity of even the most disparate lives instantly accessible.”
—Damian Flanagan, The Japan Times

“By giving readers a concert of voices, at last singing louder than Hearn’s biography and mythology, Truong asks us to ponder the ways those who are often ignored and marginalized might have their own rich, epic stories worth telling. In that sense, The Sweetest Fruits is a type of justice.”
—Eric Nguyen, diaCRITICS

“As a moving, poignant novel it is magnificent; as a recontextualization of malestream history, it is long overdue.”
—Hans Rollmann, PopMatters

“The portrait of Hearn that emerges is one of a complicated, wounded man searching for a home. And without ever giving him a voice, this thoughtfully crafted, brilliantly researched novel is an intimate look into his strange, storied life.”
—Rebecca Shapiro, Columbia Magazine

“A glorious imaginative reclamation of the stories of those who loved and nurtured [Lafcadio] Hearn and his storytelling.”
—Electric Literature

“By reclaiming these exemplary women’s voices, Truong enhances history with illuminating herstory too long overlooked.”
—Terry Hong, Booklist (Starred Review)

“The real genius in The Sweetest Fruits comes from the unseen pen of author Monique Truong, who allows each woman to speak her mind, and words are freed after years of being silently bound.”
—Paul Mori, International Examiner

“Precisely researched, The Sweetest Fruits reads like a collection of oral histories; it provides a series of vivid impressions illuminating each heroine’s personal story and her purpose in telling it.”
—Sarah Johnson, Historical Novel Society

“Truong’s smart novel, told in evocative, lush language, raises important questions of slavery and colonization.”
—The National Book Review

“What Truong has done brilliantly here is that by very decidedly placing the story in the past ... the same problems, the same divisiveness, the same fractures, somehow have almost grown deeper and more stark here in 2019.”
—Nick Petrulakis, Boston.com (20 Books that Local Experts Say You Should Read This Fall)

“Truong transforms author Lafcadio Hearn’s biography into a revelatory mystery by giving voice to three women who shaped him.”
—Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com (Ten Books to Read in September)

“A story of three women . . . who couldn’t come from worlds more different from one another—yet all cross paths with the same writer.”
—Rebecca Deczynski, Domino (What to Read This Fall)

“[A] fictionalized retelling of the life of globetrotting writer Lafcadio Hearn, Truong recounts his peripatetic days through the eyes of three women who cared for him.”
—Juliana Rose Pignataro, Newsweek (21 Books to Curl Up with This Fall)

“Monique Truong’s book focuses . . . on the three women in the major stops of Hearn’s life . . . united by the need to imagine big lives, lives outside the norm.”
—Elena Nicolaou, Refinery29 (The Best Books of September)

“[U]nique historical fiction novel . . . [s]panning both geography and decades.”
—The Everygirl (The 10 Most Anticipated Novels to Read in This Fall)

“[T]hese stories explain the life of an esteemed writer [Lafcadio Hearn] and the lives he impacted throughout his career and life.”
—Ashley Johnson, Parade (10 New Fiction Books You Won’t Want to Put Down)

“[I]magines the colorful, contradictory Hearn back to life through the stories of three women who loved and lost him.”
—Sylvia Brownrigg, Yale Magazine

“Arresting and sensual historical fiction. Her sweeping prose lifts up the unsung women behind Hearn, a man larger than life in part thanks to those whom history has failed to note.”
—Lauren LeBlanc, Observer (Must-Read New Books of Fall 2019)

“An absorbing dive into disparate places and societies, [The Sweetest Fruits] illustrates the critical roles women have played in the accomplishments of men. It also offers an intimate portrait of each region’s food culture, told through its characters.”
— Cathy Erway, Food & Wine

“Presented in four courses from the perspective of the women closest to him, The Sweetest Fruits is a feast you’ll want to devour for its arresting metaphors and its beautiful prose.”
—Anita Lo, author of Solo: A Modern Cookbook for One