Hungry Ghosts

LoveReading Says

Intense, tender and raw, Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts tells an immersive story of two families from very different sides of the track in 1940s Trinidad. It’s a mystery around a man’s disappearance, a tale of social inequalities and sweeping social change, and a novel whose characters and communities feel blisteringly real.

“Sometime in the 1940s, Trinidad. Four boys ventured to the river to perform a blood oath. Two brothers and two cousins… ‘Gonna have nothin more important than this,’ the twins told the cousins.” So begins Hungry Ghosts, introducing us to some of the Saroops who live in one of the dilapidated sugarcane estate barracks that lie “scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse.” This is Trinidad as the island nears the end of British colonialism, as the Americans arrive after Nazi U-boats are spotted in the Caribbean Sea, demolishing a village to make room for their base. As one character remarks, “times change”, and a sense of change and uprooting swells through this story.

High on the hill above the barracks, Dalton Changoor and his young wife Marlee live in luxury on their farm. One day, Dalton vanishes, leaving a mysterious note, and leaving Marlee exposed to dangers, so she invites one of their labourers to work as a watchman for a handsome stipend. As the lives of those down in the barracks and those high on the hill become entangled, we witness intense struggles to change the status quo and one’s life, and the complex consequences of those struggles. Hosein’s storytelling is sublime as the story builds with tremendous intensity. His writing is succulent, muscular and brilliantly impactful. What a book.

Joanne Owen

Find This Book In