Published in 2025
254 pages
Katie Goh is a writer, editor and author from the north of Ireland, currently living in Edinburgh.
What is this book about?
“A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it.”―Katherine May, author of Wintering
Per person, oranges are the most consumed fruit in the world. Across the world, no matter how remote or cold or incongruous a climate is, oranges will be there.
What stories could I unravel from the orange’s long ribboning peel? What new meanings could I find in its variousness, as it moves from east to west and from familiar to foreign?
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. The orange’s odyssey parallels Katie’s search for her own heritage and, drawing on her family history as well as extensive travel and research, she follows it from east-to-west and west-to-east – from Longyan, China, to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur and the groves of California.
Foreign Fruit dissolves the boundaries between social history, self and object. It reminds us that sometimes the humblest object can be capable of changing our lives and highlights our responsibility for the ways in which we tell history. Above all, Foreign Fruit shows how we all change over time – migrating, diversifying, integrating and branching out – to remind us of our shared roots.
