From Monique Truong, winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for
Literature, comes "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.
The lives of writers can often best be understood through the eyes of
those who nurtured them and made their work possible. In The Sweetest
Fruits, these three women tell the story of their time with Lafcadio
Hearn, a globetrotting writer best known for his books about Meiji-era
Japan. In their own unorthodox ways, these women are also intrepid
travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn's remarkable life
but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live
unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each is a gifted
storyteller with her own precise reason for sharing her story, and
together their voices offer a revealing, often contradictory portrait of
Hearn. With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, Truong
illuminates the women's tenacity and their struggles in a novel that
circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and
belonging.
