Hungry Ghosts: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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Hans and Shweta are still tormented by the “hungry ghost” of their infant daughter who died some years ago.

I have to say that throughout I was willing something good to come from something bad but that might be simply because I am an optimist.Destructive histories, not just the colonial past, but also the American occupation during World War II, impinge on the present, as do racism and complex, often violent connections. Fierce, angry, funny, heartbreaking - Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen, and it introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. But, as those with power make a game of his desire for a more expansive life—for sensual pleasure and land of his own—he finds himself increasingly at risk of forgetting what he has told his son about moths drawn to lamplight: “It is that hope that turns on them and gets them killed. In Conversation with Kevin Jared Hosein: 'This is a book about dreams slowly turning into nightmares; appetites slowly turning into anguish' ". Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight.

The story opens with 4 young teenage boys, two cousins from the barrack and orphaned, mysterious twins that even adults fear, making a pact to always support and defend each other against the village boys and whatever else may harm them. The bullying starts at school, spills over into the neighbouring fields and at one point involves the police. Passage", his story that won him the prize in 2018, is written in Trinidadian Creole, and is about a forester's quest to find a family living away from society, in the mountains of Trinidad, all while going through a midlife crisis.

Pity, then, the main characters in Hungry Ghosts, which centres on two families – one poor and one rich – but encompasses Trinidad in miniature as the Caribbean island struggles to emerge from its colonial past.