About this item
An ingenious retelling of a celebrated writer's migratory life through the voices of the three women who knew him best, and who testify to their own remarkable journeys, from the acclaimed author of The Book of SaltA Greek woman tells of how she willed herself out of her father's house, married an Irish officer, and came to Ireland with her two-year-old son in 1852, only to be forced to depart two years later, leaving the son behind. An African American woman, born on a plantation in the South, comes north after the Civil War to Cincinnati and takes a job as a cook at a boarding house, where in 1872 she meets and ends up marrying a young, white newspaper reporter, in defiance of the anti-miscegenation laws. In 1891 in Japan, a samurai's daughter is introduced to an international writer who is teaching English there, and becomes the mother of his four children and his unsung literary collaborator in a land where a woman risked punishment by opening her mouth.The lives of artists can often best be understood through the eyes of those who cared for them and made their work possible. In The Sweetest Fruits, these three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, tell the story of their time with Lafcadio Hearn, a globetrotting writer best known for his books about Japan. They are each travelers and explorers in their own ways; their accounts witness his life but also seek to witness their own existence and answer for themselves. They are also gifted storytellers, offering up their revealing and sometimes contradictory memories at pivotal moments in their own lives. Truong illuminates their tenacity and their struggles with brilliant sensitivity in this remarkable novel about love, family, home, and the search for belonging.
About the Author
Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, Monique Truong is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010) , is the inaugural selection of the Ladies' Home Journal Book Club. The novel received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books of 2010 by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books of 2010 by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association.
Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) was a national bestseller and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, an Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and a Seventh Annual Asian American Literary Award. In 2003, The Book of Salt was honored as a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction Book, one of the Village Voice's 25 Favorite Books, and one of the Miami Herald's Top 10 Books, among other citations.
Truong is also a contributing co-editor of Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers' Workshop, 1998) .
Truong writes a monthly online food column entitled "Ravenous" for the New York Times' T Magazine. She has contributed to Real Simple, Town & Country, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet, the Times of London (Saturday Magazine) , Time Magazine (Asia edition) , and other publications.
Truong was a PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow, a Princeton University's Hodder Fellow, and is now a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.
Truong is also an intellectual property attorney, but she hopes that you will not hold that against her. When she is not writing, which is most of the time, she cooks and takes naps. She lacks many basic life skills such as knowing how to drive a car, ride a bicycle, or read a map. She has been known to walk long distances, though, especially if there is a very good bakery located at the end of that walk.
