Booklist calls author Monique Truong a “gifted storyteller.” Here Truong pens a mesmerizing tale starring Linda Hammerick, a woman with a truly unique gift-the ability to experience words through taste. The word “disappoint” always leaves a bad taste in Linda’s mouth, like burnt toast. And this taste is particularly powerful around her family. Yet when a tragedy occurs, Linda has no choice but to return home to North Carolina. “[A] powerful novel-Booklist, starred review

“[He] came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in the newspaper.” It began captivatingly for those days: “Two American ladies wish…” It was these lines in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book that inspired The Book of Salt.

In Paris, 1934, B+ 1/4nh has accompanied his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to the train station for their departure to America. His own destination is unclear: will he go with “the Steins,” stay in France, or return to his native Vietnam?

B+ 1/4nh has fled his homeland in disgrace, leaving behind his malevolent charlatan of a father and his self-sacrificing mother. For five years, he has been the live-in cook at the famous apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Before B+ 1/4nh’s decision is revealed, his mesmerizing narrative catapults us back to his youth in French-colonized Vietnam, his years as a galley hand at sea, and his days turning out fragrant repasts for the doyennes of the lost generation.

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.