ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

It’s time to draw the winner of the giveaway offer from  Upswell Press.

The Sweetest Fruits is by Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong.

About the book:

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

In The Sweetest Fruits, three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, 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. 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.

About the author:

Monique Truong is the Vietnamese American author of the bestselling, award-winning novels The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth and The Sweetest Fruits. She’s also a former refugee, essayist, avid eater, lyricist/ librettist, and intellectual property attorney (more or less in that order).

There were 13 entries:

1. Nicole
2. Bryn Hammond
3. Pam from Travellin’ Penguin
4. Janelle
5. Marg from The Intrepid Reader
6. Mark Grieveson
7. Theresa from Theresa Smith Writes
8. Jennifer from Tasmanian Bibliophile at Large
9. Sue from Book Obsessed
10. Karenlee Thompson
11. Belinda from Here I Knit
12. Liz Dorrington
13. Willow Croft

The random number generator at Random.org came up with No 11, so the winner is Belinda from Here I Knit.  Congratulations, Belinda!  To receive your book, you need to provide me with a postal address and permission to pass it on to the publisher who will then send the book to you.  (I will redraw if this condition isn’t met within a fortnight.)

Update 15/10/21: Alas, it turns out that the winner didn’t have an Australian postcode for delivery, so I’ve done a redraw and the lucky winner is Mark Grieveson.  He has two weeks to provide me with a postal address and permission to pass it on to the publisher who will then send the book to him!

Thanks to everyone who entered, and if you missed out, commiserations, you can buy the book from Upswell or good bookstores anywhere.  (Or drop hints so that someone buys it for you!)