The Sweetest Fruits

The Sweetest Fruits circumnavigates the globe, introducing three unforgettable women connected by their love for one man. They narrate their own stories and their intrepid search for love and belonging.

With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, The Sweetest Fruits illuminates the women's tenacity and their struggles in this novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and belonging.

Monique Truong gives voice to three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, who each tell the story of their life with Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), a globetrotting Greek-Irish writer best known as the author of America's first Creole cookbook and for his many volumes about the folklore and ghost stories of Meiji Era Japan. An immigrant thrice over, Hearn is now remembered at best as a keen cultural observer and at worst as a purveyor of exotica.

In their own unorthodox ways, the three women are also intrepid travellers 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.