About this item
"A sublime, many-voiced novel of voyage and reinvention" (Anthony Marra) "[Truong] imagines the extraordinary lives of three women who loved an extraordinary man [and] creates distinct, engaging voices for these women" (Kirkus Reviews) A Greek woman tells of how she willed herself out of her father's cloistered house, married an Irish officer in the British Army, and came to Ireland with her two-year-old son in 1852, only to be forced to leave without him soon after. An African American woman, born into slavery on a Kentucky plantation, makes her way to Cincinnati after the Civil War to work as a boarding house cook, where in 1872 she meets and marries an up-and-coming newspaper reporter. In Matsue, Japan, in 1891, a former samurai's daughter is introduced to a newly arrived English teacher, and becomes the mother of his four children and his unsung literary collaborator.
About the Author
Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She is a writer based now in Brooklyn. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019) , Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010) , and The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) . She is also an essayist and librettist, working in collaboration with the composer Joan La Barbara. A Guggenheim Fellow, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in Tokyo, Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and Princeton University's Hodder Fellow, she was most recently the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College in New York City. Truong received her BA in Literature from Yale University and her JD from Columbia Law School. Visit her at www.monique-truong.com
