This is a well-written, almost lyrical book told from the point of view of three women who loved the writer Lafcadio Hearn. Their stories are fascinating on their own and explore questions of women’s freedom and identity.

The only problem with this book, for me, is that I don’t care nearly as much about Hearn as I do about these other stories. As a result, it felt odd that their stories were dependent on his.

I reviewed this book in several places and will provide the details directly to the publisher in the next step of this review process.

Lafcadio Hearn was one of my childhood heroes. I have no idea what led me sixty years ago to discover him and find his books in a public library. I think I am the only book blogger to have posted on his short stories.

Last month I read and posted on a wonderful novel, set in Paris in the 1930s, The Book of Salt by Monique Turong centering on a Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. When I discovered she had a forthcoming novel, The Sweetest Fruit focusing on the important women in Hearn's live, I knew I had to read it soon. My immediate bottom line is I loved this book.


The Sweetest Fruit in first person narratives portrays the life experiences of his mother, his American wife and lastly his Japanese wife with whom he had four children.

Our first narrator is Rosa Cassimati, Hearn's mother. Rosa grew up on a small Greek island, Kythira. Her story is structured as if it were a letter to her son which she, not being literate, is dictating to her maid. Rosa was raised under very strict supervision by her father. He wanted to protect her from the outside world. Just before she is to be sent to a convent she meets Charles Hearn. Charles is an Irish military surgeon stationed for a while on Kythira. A romance ensues, she gets pregnant and they marry. Through a series of events Rosa and young Lafcafio ended up living with an aunt of Charles living in Dublin when Charles is called away. She had to escape her island due to her pregnancy. Rosa and Charles had little in common. In her letter to her son, who she left in Dublin when she went home, never being happy in Dublin and not really wanted by the aunt, a lot is revealed about her life growing up on Kytnira and her relationship to Charles. He will ultimately abandon her to take to the seas. They were very much a mismatch. Rosa will never see her son again.

Our second narrator is Althea Foley, it is 1872, she is a freed slave working as a cook in a boarding house in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is African American. Lafcadio, also known as Patrick, lives in the boarding house. He works as a journalist and has some success as a journalist. They marry even though mixed race marriages were illegal. Flashing ahead to 1905 or so, Lafcafio has passed away, leaving a cash estate. Althea is telling her story to a journalist, like Rosa, she is illiterate, in the hope of validating her claim as his widow.
Along the way we learn a good bit about race relations in Ohio right after the Civil War. They do seem to love each other but their are deep cultural divides that doom the relationship. Also it appears Lafcadio was getting bored with her. We are left wondering why he entered into such a socially unacceptable relationship. We also learn Althea believes he was involved with other women. Lafcadio was very into the reading life, any extra money he had he used to buy books.


After ten years in New Orleans, working as a journalist and a translator in 1890 he is sent to Japan as a newspaper correspondent. Here he met Kaixumi Setsu, he married her and they had four children. She helped him get a prestigious position teaching English at a university. He became deeply fascinated with Japanese culture. He learns Japanese and becomes a Buddhist. He becomes a Japanese subject. He began to publish recreations of Japanese folk and fairy tales in English. It is these stories that brought him fame and some fortune. Hearn seems to have found a home in Japan. Her story is told to after his death. She is also claiming his estate.

In the narrative Hearn himself remains a bit of a mystery. His two wives only know aspects of him. We don't really learn a lot about him.

Truong has brilliantly portrayed three different women in diverse cultures.
She offers vivid descriptions of all of the settings.

I highly recommend The Sweetest Fruit.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was a writer apparently once on the level of Poe and Twain. I'm guessing most people are like me and had never heard of him. Perhaps that makes the telling of this historical novel even better. Told from the perspectives of the women who knew and loved him, we hear the story of his life, from a Greek island, to the UK, on to Cincinnati and finally in Japan, but only ever in the words of the women in his life. Each of their voices rings crystalline clear as they elucidate the life of a complicated man. Superbly well done.

At one point in Monique Truong’s novel, The Sweetest Fruits, one of the narrators tells her interviewer that it’s not enough to just get the story of one person: you have to also get the stories of the people around them. And that’s exactly what we get in this novel based on the life of author Lafcadio Hearn and three of the women in his life. (Technically four, if you count the excerpts from Elizabeth Bisland‘s biography of her friend.) While we learn a lot about Hearn, I was more fascinated by the lives of the women who loved him than I was about a man who often struck me as selfish and fussy. The women tell us about love, sacrifice, abandonment, difficult choices, compatibility, and so much more. This book is an amazing piece of writing that, while it hews very close to actual history, amplifies it in ways that only faction can do.

The first narrator we meet is Rosa Cassimati (Rosa Antoniou Kassimatis), Hearn’s Venetian Greek mother. She is returning to her home island of Kythira after spending unhappy years in Dublin, with her Anglo-Irish husband’s aunt. She tells her story to her maid, to dictate her words into a long letter to her son to explain why she left him in Ireland. Rosa takes us all the way back to her adolescences, when she was a virtual prisoner to a father who was trying to “protect” her from the outside world. Just before she is sent off to a convent, she meets Charles Hearn and the pair fall in love. Things get out of hand and the two are forced into more entanglement than they perhaps wanted. Rosa’s letter to Lafcadio is brutally honest and deeply colored by her regret.

For the rest of The Sweetest Fruits, I wondered if his parents relationship was foreshadowing for the rest of the writer’s life. The second part of the book, narrated by Hearn’s first wife, Alethea Foley, had me thinking that Lafcadio might be the second coming of Charles Hearn. Alethea was enslaved in Kentucky before the Freedom, as she calls it. Afterwards, Alethea moved to Cincinnati and worked as a boarding house cook. Her relationship with Hearn started slowly; I wasn’t always sure if they were deliberately courting or not. Alethea’s retelling of their story—told to a reporter in an effort to help her gain her rights as a lawful wife—also had me wondering if Alethea knew that their relationship was doomed. In retrospect, Alethea can definitely see the warning signs: Lafcadio’s sudden realization of what having a black wife would mean for his social standing, his anger over things like what’s for dinner and how it’s prepared, the stress of living close to the bone, financially speaking. When Lafcadio departs for New Orleans, it feels more inevitable than anything else.

The last part of the novel, narrated by Hearn’s second wife, Koizumi Setsu, has a completely different emotional tone. Setsu is in mourning, but she doesn’t seem to carry the deep regret or anger of our first two narrators. Where Rosa was fleeing a place where she didn’t fit in and Alethea speaks from a place where Lafcadio couldn’t fit in, Setsu reveals how Lafcadio found a home in Japan. There is conflict between the two, but Lafcadio seems to find whatever he was looking for all his life in this new country, far from where he started in the Mediterranean Ocean. Setsu describes their life together as creating their own country and language. They are not the foreigners or the outcasts anymore; everyone outside their circle is a foreigner. I think this is what Hearn was looking for for so long. In Ireland, he was a half-Greek dependent suddenly dropped on a family that didn’t want him. In the Untied States, he was an Irishman who married a black woman, making him double outcast. In Japan, however, he was welcomed—so much so that he became a Japanese subject.

After reading The Sweetest Fruits, I don’t have any desire to learn more about Hearn. His lifelong need to make the world around him just so bothered me, especially as so much of it came through unacknowledged emotional labor from the women who tell this story. I had much more sympathy for the narrators. So much so, that I loved getting their stories as they made room for Lafcadio in their homes and lives. This book is so rich in the ideas and themes that come up that I think a literary-minded and/or feminist book club would also devour it. Truong’s writing is also beautiful as it gives each narrator her own distinct voice, motivations, and experiences. The Sweetest Fruits is an astonishingly great read.

Three distinctive, remarkable women narrate Truong’s third novel. They never meet, but their lives are interconnected, and subtly influenced by one another’s, through one person they all love: Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-born, Irish-raised writer and translator who became a talented journalist in mid-19th century America, and whose stories about his final home of Japan introduced Western audiences to his beloved adopted country. He was a man created of continuous reinvention, and the journey he followed was so wide-ranging and unusual for its time that it’s hard to believe one 54-year life encapsulated it all. That said, it’s the women who shine here, and in a notable shift in perspective, Hearn comes alive only through their words. His absence from the page is frequently more palpable than his presence.

The first voice, expressed with lyricism and a mother’s yearning for her long-lost child, is that of Rosa Cassimati, a sheltered nobleman’s daughter from the Greek island of Cythera who was forced to leave her second son, Patricio, behind with his Anglo-Irish father’s family. Beginning in 1906, Alethea Foley, a formerly enslaved woman employed as a cook in a Cincinnati boardinghouse, remembers the boarder, Pat Hearn, who she admires and eventually marries—an event which has repercussions due to miscegenation laws. The longest tale belongs to Hearn’s second wife, Koizumi Setsu, a samurai’s daughter who bears him four children and sees his transformation from a foreign English teacher into a naturalized Japanese citizen.

Precisely researched, The Sweetest Fruits reads like a collection of oral histories; it provides a series of vivid impressions illuminating each heroine’s personal story and her purpose in telling it. While it may disappoint readers seeking an addictive plot, it resounds with character and feeling and has much to offer observers of historical women’s hidden lives.