Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. The recipient of many literary awards, she is also an essayist, a librettist, and, thankfully, no longer an intellectual property attorney.

Her three novels are the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), the award-winning Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), set in Boiling Springs, N.C., her family's first hometown in the U.S., and The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019).

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