Foreign Fruit

“Documenting the orange across time and space, Foreign Fruit is a powerful meditation on the relationships between commodities and colonialism, place and produce, self and history.”—Full Stop

“Brings nuance and deep thought to questions of what it means to be foreign, and what it means to belong…. [As] readable as a listicle and conversational as a coffee date.”—Colorado Review

“This is the type of nonfiction I love. A blend of memoir and criticism that explores a topic in a way I never encountered. Goh’s writing is inventive and intelligent.”—Debutiful, A Best Debut Nonfiction Book of 2025

“As Goh traces the history of the orange, she then discovers a journey that mirrors her own.”—Table Magazine, A Best Food Memoir of 2025

“Lyrical and biting and rife with irresistible citrus facts and peripatetic insights, Goh’s narrative intricately grafts private and global narratives into a singular literary achievement.”—Booklist

“Wildly inventive.”—Orange County Register

“Stunning. . . . Goh navigates notions of hybridity, immigration, colonization, commerce, belonging, family, violence and myth. She masterly splices and grafts together these thematic elements and histories into an energetic, illuminating, well cultivated memoir.”—West Trade Review

“A really beautiful story with incredible writing. For people who love memoir, history, food stories… it’s just excellent.”—Book Riot

“Elegant . . . Goh refuses simple stories, instead conjuring a complex, finely woven exploration of the citrus and the self.”—NPR Books

“The book certainly goes deep on the popular citrus and its central role in international trade, from its origins in the ancient world to its present ubiquity. But the journalist, like the orange, has ancestral roots that span the globe, and here the juicy fruit reveals still another valence — as a lens on the world, and a layered metaphor for Goh’s past and our collective future.”—NPR

“The orange has a complicated history, which Katie Goh unravels exquisitely in this hybrid memoir.”—Autostraddle

“You’ll want to peel back the layers and savor to the last page.”—Chicago Review of Books

“She moves easily among her research, the fruit’s complicated past, and her own heritage. . . . Those who claim both history and memoir as favorite genres are likely to adore this hybrid work.”—BookPage

“This book sounds like it perfectly sums up the best parts of a great microhistory: a niche topic you’ve always loved written by a relatively new and talented writer.”—Scientific American

“A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it.”—Katherine May, author of Wintering

“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 Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries

“Foreign Fruit is 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, finding ways to grow and claim a story beyond which she’d first thought was hers to take. 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

“Foreign Fruit offers one of the strongest openings of a non-fiction book I’ve read in a long time, refusing history to stay at a distance and the trade wealth is built on to remain 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. What’s more, she injects her memoir writing with an essential critique and awareness of what it means to turn your own pain into a commodity as a person of colour in a white-dominated media landscape, and as a writer of mixed belongings in a market that seeks to routinely label.”—Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, author of The Nerves and Their Endings and How We Are Translated

“Beautiful, visceral and powerful writing that speaks from the heart and to the heart. I could feel every word: the frustration, the confusion and the joy. Foreign Fruit is a raw and fascinating book that delves into the important meaning of fruit that we take for granted every day, as well as the history of fruit in Asian cultures. I absolutely adored it.”—Angela Hui, author of Takeaway