About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherPenguin Publishing Group

ISBN-100735221022

ISBN-139780735221024

eBay Product ID (ePID)7050082869

Product Key Features

Book TitleSweetest Fruits : a Novel

Number of Pages304 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2020

TopicLiterary, Biographical, Historical

GenreFiction

AuthorMonique Truong

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight8.6 Oz

Item Length8 in

Item Width5.4 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2020-016186

TitleLeadingThe

Dewey Edition23

Dewey Decimal813/.6

SynopsisFrom 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.

LC Classification NumberPS3620.R86S94 2020