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.
