A Provocative Story for the Eyes, Ears, and Imagination
Surrender to an outrageous tropical burlesque about the creative act of finding and keeping love.
“Original and thought-provoking. It will leave you in awe.”
—Elizabeth Sagan @elizabeth_sagan
About Island Fruit Remedy
What might it take for a spurned fantasist to find hearth and home?
Wood is a romance writer whose wife leaves him. Stung, and with a head full of fantasies, he hastens to Key West to heal.
On the Key, Wood encounters women with the names and personalities of tropical fruit. Each holds a mirror up to his romantic ideas, and with one, he forms a deep connection.
But the mystery of the elusive Papaya is a fantasy he can’t set aside, and it threatens to destroy everything—until, in his greatest moment of need, Wood conjures the ultimate teacher . . .
With burlesque flair and keen insight, Island Fruit Remedy rewards the reader with an unexpectedly sober discovery about the creative act of finding and keeping love.
About the Book
A Q&A with Rich Shapero
Q: Our protagonist, Wood, is a fantasist. It takes him some time to see his romantic fantasies for what they are. One has to wonder: do you write from experience?
RS: If you’re going for the truth, there’s no other way.
Q: It’s a difficult journey for him, but he finds home and hearth.
RS: He does. In a way, Island Fruit Remedy is a counterstatement to Rin, Tongue and Dorner. Wood finds what Dorner does not. The remedy is truthful to me, because that’s how I experienced it. Finding home and hearth is difficult if it’s not part of your childhood.
More About the BookAbout the Artwork and Animations
A Q&A with Rich Shapero
Q: Artwork appears in the digital versions of most of your novels, but there is a striking connection between Ramón Alejandro’s paintings and the specific events and ideas in Island Fruit Remedy
RS: In no other project is the correspondence so close. It was a collaboration in every respect, from character to plot to setting to theme. The idea for the story germinated in the eighties, long before I knew Ramón’s work. But I couldn’t figure out how to tell the story. Ramón gave me the characters and events, and it was his outlook on gender that helped me make Wood’s experience concrete.
“The Tamarind tree was loaded with fruit, far more, it seemed, than any man could consume.
Wood pulled off the pods in handfuls and crushed them, and as soon as the gluey pulp passed his lips, he reached for more. The words she had spoken, the ‘something’ she wanted— His senses were drowning . . .
Then he opened his mouth, and . . . Tamarind’s seeds fell into his hands . . . And in every one, he could see his reflection.”
