Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange

by Katie Goh

Overview

Named A Best Debut Book of 2025 by Debutiful

“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?

What begins as a curiosity into the origins of the orange soon becomes a far-reaching odyssey of citrus for Katie Goh. Katie follows the complicated history of the orange from east-to-west and west-to-east, from a luxury item of European kings and Chinese emperors, to a modest fruit people take for granted. This investigation parallels Katie’s powerful search into her own heritage. Growing up queer in a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish household in the north of Ireland, Katie felt herself at odds with the culture and politics around her. As a teenager, Katie visits her ancestral home in Longyan, China, with her family to better understand her roots, but doesn’t find the easy, digestible answers she hoped for.

In her mid-twenties, when her grandmother falls ill, she ventures again to the land of her ancestors, Malaysia, where more questions of self and belonging are raised. In her travels and reflections, she navigates histories that she wants to understand, but has never truly felt a part of. Like the story of the orange, Katie finds that simple and extractable explanations—even about a seemingly simple fruit—are impossible. The story that unfolds is Katie’s incredible endeavor to flesh out these contradictions, to unpeel the layers of personhood; a reflection on identity through the cipher of the orange. Along the way, the orange becomes so much more than just a fruit—it emerges as a symbol, a metaphor, and a guide. Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange is a searching, wide-ranging, seamless weaving of storytelling with research and a meditative, deeply moving encounter with the orange and the self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781963108231
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Katie Goh is a writer, editor and author from the north of Ireland, currently living in Edinburgh.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

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

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

"A blend of memoir and criticism that explores a topic in a way I never encountered. Goh’s writing is inventive and intelligent."— Debutiful

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

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

"Wildly inventive."— Orange County Register

"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

"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

"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

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

"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

"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

"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

"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

From the Publisher

★ 2025-03-04
Goh uncovers the history of empires inside a ubiquitous fruit.

“I follow the orange because it offers a model for a hybrid existence and I, too, seek my own meaning in the world,” writes Goh in her multifaceted narration of citrus. She follows the history of the orange in research that spans continents, centuries, and legends. We learn of the orange’s mythic origins in China, the many Silk Roads that brought citrus to Europe, and the shorelines that European colonizers planted with the scurvy-defying fruits. Goh demonstrates how the history of the orange is a history of colonialism, a history of exoticism, and one of convenience. We learn of the bubonic plague, when orange peels were dried and used to mask the smell of sickness. In the 2020 pandemic, the author bought bags of oranges with gloved hands and a masked visage, the fruit distant from its origins, made clinical under fluorescent lights. Artfully interwoven in the narrative is Goh’s own history and that of her family. In rural China, the author meets her relatives, though they speak a dialect unknown to her. In Malaysia, she visits her aging grandmother and discovers pomelo orchards in the wake of tin extraction. And she writes of Ireland, the place of her upbringing and her mother’s family, where oranges are shipped across land and water to meet the desires of citrus-hungry consumers. “Per person, oranges are the most consumed fruit in the world,” she writes, and in these pages the fruit is seen across many essential parts of human history. Oranges expand into metaphors—the way we discuss family trees, hybridity, and naturalization are deconstructed, and their citrine trail reckoned with. Goh’s quest for self-knowledge mirrors the journey of citrus itself. 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.

Kirkus Reviews