Fiction. Animations. App.
Island Fruit Remedy combines Rich Shapero’s stirring novel with whimsical art animations to create a delicious immersive story experience.
“Original and thought-provoking. It will leave you in awe.”
—Elizabeth Sagan @elizabeth_sagan
About Island Fruit Remedy
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 free-wheeling 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 tells a stirring story about learning to love.
Download the entire book as PDFAbout 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.