Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
A hauntingly beautiful hybrid memoir that uses the journey and cultivation of a single fruit – the orange – to reckon with the author’s own identity and unpack themes of globalisation, colonialism and migration
WINNER OF SCOTLAND’S NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FOR DEBUT NON-FICTION
A DEBUTIFUL BEST NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘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.
“Superbly reflective, restive and revealing … Goh is a bold new voice in Irish writing… Foreign Fruit is a stunning, stylish search for origins reminiscent of books like Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, and the work of queer writers like James Baldwin”
irish Times
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“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
“A deeply thoughtful, funny and moving treatise on identity and the myriad factors that go into influencing it. A sharp and exhilarating read from start to finish. You will never look at oranges in your fruit bowl the same way again”
big Issue
“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
Katie Goh
Katie Goh is a writer and editor. Her award-nominated essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in publications including Port, the Guardian, Gutter, Wasafiri, i-D, Dazed and gal-dem, and she is an editor for Extra Teeth literary magazine. Her book of essays The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was a Reviewer’s Choice for The Big Issue’s Independent Books of 2021 and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize in 2022. She grew up in the north of Ireland and lives in Edinburgh.
katiegoh.co.uk | @katie_goh_