The Sweetest Fruits
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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Lisa Flanagan
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Adenrele Ojo
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Emily Woo Zeller
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By:
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Monique Truong
About this listen
"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.
©2019 Monique Truong (P)2019 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
Winner of the Binghamton Center for Writers’ John Gardner Fiction Prize
"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)
"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)
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Story
India, 1870s. In a tiny village where society is ruled by a caste system and women are defined solely by marriage, young Biren Roy dreams of forging a new destiny. When his mother suffers the fate of widowhood - shunned by her loved ones and forced to live in solitary penance - Biren devotes his life to effecting change.
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Riveting Love Story
- By Granny on 01-15-20
By: Shona Patel
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Mary
- Mrs. A. Lincoln
- By: Janis Cooke Newman
- Narrated by: Anne Buelteman
- Length: 26 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A fascinating and intimate novel of the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, narrated by the First Lady herself. Mary Todd Lincoln is one of history's most misunderstood and enigmatic women. She was a political strategist, a supporter of emancipation, and a mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband. She also ran her family into debt, held séances in the White House, and was committed to an insane asylum - which is where Janis Cooke Newman's debut novel begins.
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Intriguing and well-written, Worst editing EVER.
- By Danielle on 03-21-15
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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Gone with the Wind
- By: Margaret Mitchell
- Narrated by: Linda Stephens
- Length: 49 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Margaret Mitchell's great novel of the South is one of the most popular books ever written. Within six months of its publication in 1936, Gone With the Wind had sold a million copies. To date, it has been translated into 25 languages, and more than 28 million copies have been sold. Here are the characters that have become symbols of passion and desire....
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not to miss audible experience
- By dallas on 12-08-09
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Homeless Bird
- By: Gloria Whelan
- Narrated by: Zehra Jane Naqvi
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Like many girls her age in India, thirteen-year-old Koly faces her arranged marriage with hope and courage. But Koly's story takes a terrible turn when in the wake of the ceremony, she discovers she's been horribly misled—her life has been sold for a dowry. Can she forge her own future, even in the face of time-worn tradition? Perfect for schools and classrooms, this universally acclaimed, bestselling, and award-winning novel by master of historical fiction Gloria Whelan is a gripping tale of hope that will transport listeners of all ages.
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Beautiful
- By Zrexsmom on 10-30-24
By: Gloria Whelan
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Bitter in the Mouth
- By: Monique Truong
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.
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"Tasting Words" made this hard to hear!
- By Kate Anderson on 11-06-11
By: Monique Truong
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Pavilion of Women
- By: Pearl S. Buck
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 15 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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On her 40th birthday, Madame Wu carries out a decision she has been planning for a long time: she tells her husband that after 24 years their physical life together is now over and she wishes him to take a second wife. The House of Wu, one of the oldest and most revered in China, is thrown into an uproar by her decision, but Madame Wu will not be dissuaded and arranges for a young country girl to come take her place in bed.
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Horrible narration!
- By ClearlyCrystalAnn on 06-17-15
By: Pearl S. Buck
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The Blue Between Sky and Water
- By: Susan Abulhawa
- Narrated by: Jennifer Woodward
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
It is 1947, and Beit Daras, a quiet village in Palestine surrounded by olive groves, is home to the Baraka family. Eldest daughter Nazmiyeh looks after her widowed mother, prone to wandering and strange outbursts, while her brother, Mamdouh, tends to the village bees. Their younger sister, Mariam, with her striking mismatched eyes, spends her days talking to imaginary friends and writing.
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Horrible pronunciation
- By Debra Sabah Press on 11-08-18
By: Susan Abulhawa
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Douglass' Women
- By: Jewell Parker Rhodes
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The best-selling author of Voodoo Dreams focuses on two women who loved the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Anna, a free woman of color, was his rescuer, his loving wife and mother to his children. Ottilie Assing, a white German woman, became his intellectual soul mate and mistress. At times, they all lived under the same roof.
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Captivating
- By MJ on 02-09-24
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City of Tranquil Light
- A Novel
- By: Bo Caldwell
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war.
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What We're Here For
- By Annette on 10-14-10
By: Bo Caldwell
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The Lioness of Morocco
- By: Julia Drosten, Christiane Galvani - translator
- Narrated by: Henrietta Meire
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Independent-minded Sibylla Spencer feels trapped in 19th-century London, where her strong will and progressive views have rendered her unmarriageable. Still single at 23, she is treated like a child and feels stifled in her controlling father's house. When Benjamin Hopkins, an ambitious employee of her father's trading company, shows an interest in her, she realizes marriage is her only chance to escape.
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The Lioness o Morocco
- By MM on 06-23-17
By: Julia Drosten, and others
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Jerusalem Maiden
- By: Talia Carner
- Narrated by: Lise Bruneau
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, a young Orthodox Jewish woman in the holy city of Jerusalem is expected to marry and produce many sons to help hasten the Messiah's arrival. While the feisty Esther Kaminsky understands her obligations, her artistic talent inspires her to secretly explore worlds outside her religion, to dream of studying in Paris - and to believe that God has a special destiny for her. When tragedy strikes her family, Esther views it as a warning from an angry God....
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No dreaming, No painting, No thinking . . .
- By Debbie on 04-18-15
By: Talia Carner
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Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
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Where Have You Been All My Life, Thomas Mann?
- By Virginia Waldron on 03-30-17
By: Thomas Mann