Description

LONGLISTED FOR SCOTLAND’S NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

‘A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it’ – KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering

The orange we know, waxed in vats, gathered in red netting and stacked in supermarket displays, is not the same orange that grew from the first straggling orange grove that took root on the Tibetan plateau, part pomelo and part mandarin. The orange is a souvenir of history. Across time, it has been a harbinger of God and doom, fortune and failure, pleasure and suffering. It is a fruit containing metaphors, dreams, mythologies, superstitions, parables and histories within its tough rind. So, what happens when the fruit is peeled and each segment – each moment of history, each meaning in time – is pulled apart?

In this distinct, subversive and intimate hybrid memoir, Katie Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. What she finds is a world of violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation – and of unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds.

Publisher Review

Beautiful, visceral and powerful writing that speaks from the heart and to the heart. I could feel every word. A raw and fascinating book — ANGELA HUI, author of TAKEAWAY With elegance and sharpness, Foreign Fruit intertwines the historical and personal to give a thoughtful, poetic and clear-sighted meditation on roots, migration and connectedness that will make you question how stories – ours and the world’s – are shaped — CECILE PIN, author of WANDERING SOULS A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it — KATHERINE MAY, author of WINTERING and ENCHANTMENT In smart, engrossing prose, Goh teaches us as much about the fruits as about ourselves. A brilliant history of the orange that, like citrus, defies classification — Starred Review * * Kirkus * * Like the fruit at its centre, Foreign Fruit is both sweet and sharp. In Goh’s skilled hands, the orange becomes a powerful symbol to explore centuries of migration and memory. This book is a masterful blend of social history and memoir. I savoured every page of Goh’s prose — FREYA BROMLEY, author of THE TIDAL YEAR An encounter not only with the orange, but with the reality of diasporic life in hostile environments. Goh patiently and skilfully reinvents the orange as a means of inventing her identity [. . .] and what we’re given is a story more surprising, potent and various than we could ever have imagined — AMY KEY, author of ISN’T FOREVER and ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE This is an important, intelligent and insightful book that melds Goh’s journalistic and investigative skills on the history and politics of migration and colonialism with wonderfully warm yet astute reflections on her diasporic family and being mixed race, and how identities shape-shift over time, circumstance and geographies — AMANDA THOMSON, author of BELONGING Elusive, subverting the popular genre of the “history of things” in elegant ways, Katie Goh writes with as admirable a preciseness about self-othering as she does about botanical history — JESSICA GAITAN JOHANNESSON, author of THE NERVES AND THEIR ENDINGS and HOW WE ARE TRANSLATED I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t love this book. Airy and rooted, its style as beautiful as its investigations, this is the kind of book that holds in it the unexplored ecosophical inquiries of our time — SUMANA ROY, author of HOW I BECAME A TREE This is a book to be devoured – so visceral that I can feel the drip of the orange’s juice on my skin as I read. The writing is poetic and beautiful, every detail written with such care. But this story is laced with pain that feels physical, thanks to Katie’s ability to capture the small moments whilst also laying bare the violence of racism, the complexity of migration and so much more — ANNA SULAN MASING, author of CHINESE AND OTHER ASIAN