The Sweetest Fruits

Praise for The Sweetest Fruits

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
EDITOR’S CHOICE

“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.”

—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.”