Publishers Weekly
12/05/2022
Hosein (The Beast of Kukuyo) sets this thorny literary thriller in the divided Trinidad of the mid-1940s. Eccentric landowner Dalton Changoor’s fortune is tied to an unspecified criminal enterprise. His wife, Marlee, doesn’t have the details but can pick up the vibe, as “the kind of money that Dalton brought in seemed flecked with blood.” When Dalton goes missing, Marlee worries he’s been killed, and wonders who did it. Then, after receiving a ransom note, she wonders “what would happen if she didn’t care to pay.” As the kidnappers try to intimidate Marlee by prowling around the property at night, Marlee asks one of the farmhands, Hans, to guard the house. Hans has spent his life in abject poverty in the barrack alongside his wife, Shweta; their two sons; and five other families. Shweta is desperate to leave the barrack, and Marlee’s offer comes with enough money to help them buy their own plot of land. Though a deluge of detail bogs down the pacing, Hosein imbues the proceedings with the swelter of subtropical noir, and entwines his class and colonial commentary with Hans and Marlee’s fraught arrangement, as Marlee becomes financially desperate and Hans gets a taste for a better life. Patient readers will find plenty of rewards in this complex tale. Agent: Chris Wellbelove, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
This is a deeply impressive book, and I think an important one. Its intensity, its narrative attack, the fascinations of its era and setting, make it impossible to tear the attention away. Energy and inventiveness distinguish every page.” — Hilary Mantel
"Hungry Ghosts is beautiful, biblical, vast in scope and power, ringing with an energy that blasts from the intricate language. Hosein is a new giant of fiction." — Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters and Everything Under
“Kevin Jared Hosein’s majestic and sinuous command of language summons the lush landscape of 1940s Trinidad as it wrestles with the poisonous legacy of colonialism. The characters at the center of Hungry Ghosts are suffused with a longing that is palpable on the page and haunts you long after reading. Hosein has written a singular, powerful novel.” — Chanelle Benz, author of The Gone Dead
“The biggest, most frightening, beautiful, and alive novel I’ve read in as long as I can remember.” — Evie Wyld, author of The Bass Rock
"Hungry Ghosts is an astonishing book—linguistically gorgeous, narratively propulsive, and psychologically profound." — Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other
"Hosein... sensitively teases apart the tangled web of class and religion and emphasizes the hard choices the powerless routinely live with." — Booklist (starred review)
“In Hungry Ghosts, Kevin Jared Hosein takes a small place, a particular slice of Trinidad and writes it with the depth and scope that it deserves. And he does it because he knows it - truly, deeply. The result is a story that is harrowing, fiercely beautiful and deeply human. I won’t soon forget these characters or this story. I think we are going to be talking about this book for a long time to come.” — Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, author of When We Were Birds
"A vibrant portrait...Hosein evokes all this in rich, visceral language...His story, often brutal, ultimately tragic, is nevertheless lit by a wide embrace reaching beyond place and people to the bedrock...Immersive, persuasive: an elemental 'portal to the Caribbean' delivered in a distinctive voice." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Both a family drama and an acute study of social structure...A highly recommended story of family and class divides that will break readers’ hearts." — Library Journal
"Rich in vocabulary and description, the novel situates characters in a meticulously detailed setting that evokes Middlemarch, with a similar empathy for human struggle... In scope and style, it’s not far off a masterpiece." — Financial Times
"Hungry Ghosts has the mesmerizing power of a tale told on a bone-chilling night...A novel that slowly builds toward a climax of Shakespearean proportions...Hosein excels at setting this volatile stage and letting events simmer. Along the way, he delicately explores the often tortured backgrounds of numerous characters in his large cast, revealing their motives and desires...Readers will long remember this one." — BookPage
"[A] searing debut...Like the best historical fiction, Hungry Ghosts is immersed in the ideas and complexities of its’ shifting time period, for a triumph of well-researched storytelling." — CrimeReads
"The characters’ dialogue and deeper thoughts unfold with an authentic blend of English and the local patois...the land, the food, and the hard lives portrayed in Hungry Ghosts will stay with those who finish this saga." — Historical Novel Society
“What luscious, troubling, shimmering cloth Hosein has spun…Hungry Ghosts reads like a Greek tragedy relocated to a gothic Caribbean setting worthy of Jean Rhys — a story of cursed families and inherited vengeance, inexplicable horrors and impossible dreams and a country haunted, as Hosein reminds us, by the ghosts of the indentured…Hosein gives us no easy answers in this sumptuous, brilliantly written novel." — Times (London)
"A barnstorming fable about the perils of upward mobility, set in the dog days of colonial rule in the author’s native Trinidad … Told with riveting verve, this is a terrific novel, pegged to national as well as domestic strife, peopled by flesh-and blood characters and plotted to keep us on tenterhooks about the story’s pole-axing finale." — Daily Mail (UK)
"Kevin Jared Hosein’s novel Hungry Ghosts takes place on a sugar estate in 1940s Trinidad and the language is as lush, moody and thrilling as the landscape...Electrifying." — New York Times
"An intriguing read that forces us to confront the harsh realities of life and its varying juxtapositions of violence and beauty, love and hate, faith and despair.” — BookBrowse
Library Journal
12/01/2022
DEBUT Set in 1940s Trinidad, as British and U.S. imperial power start their downslide, this novel from Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Hosein (his first to be published in the U.S., after several published in the Caribbean, including International Dublin Literary Award long-listed The Repenters) is both a family drama and an acute study of social structure. Wealthy landowner Dalton Changoor has disappeared, and his wife Marlee flirtatiously asks one of the workers, Hans Saroop, to stay at their house at night as protection. That will take Hans away from wife Shweta, son Krishna, and his just-hanging-on Hindu community living in a tumbledown barrack that once served a colonial sugar plantation. Hans is a good man who neither drinks nor gambles, but his marriage has been strained by the death of a daughter, which has left Shweta inconsolable. Meanwhile, teenage Krishna is bullied at the upscale missionary school he attends, turning for respite to cousin Tarak and roustabout twin friends with a shady father; Hans is pulling away from the family just when Krishna needs him the most. As the narrative builds to a corrosively painful ending, Krishna muses that "the man he's known his whole life had changed. Or worse—had always been that way"; the question of whether we can change our lives hovers ominously throughout. VERDICT A highly recommended story of family and class divides that will break readers' hearts.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-11-16
A vibrant portrait of Trinidad in the 1940s traces various members of a multiracial community grappling with poverty, emotional connection, and “hereditary pain.”
Starting with the disappearance of secretive landowner Dalton Changoor, the blood-brother swearing of four local lads, and a drowned dog, Hosein—a celebrated author from Trinidad and Tobago—plunges readers into the turbulent stream of Bell Village life on a not-always-paradisiacal-seeming Caribbean island. His cast of characters is wide, forefronted by Hansraj “Hans” Saroop, one of Changoor’s laborers, and his family—wife Shweta, son Krishna. Their home, on an old sugar cane estate, is the barrack, a rat-infested, leaking, multifamily dwelling with a shared latrine, in contrast with the large Changoor home, a manor now occupied solely by the landowner’s wife, Marlee, left in the dark about her husband’s whereabouts or return plans. Faced with ransom notes and a second dog’s death, Marlee pays Hans to be her night watchman, arousing suspicions in both Shweta and Krishna. Meanwhile, secondary characters—other barrack dwellers, bullying teenagers, unreliable policemen, and more—impact events and shade in the “anecdotal tapestry.” 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. There are gods—Hans and his family are Hindu; his colleague Robinson is Christian; Rookmin, the wise woman of the barrack, adheres to the old beliefs—and devils who beat their wives and worse. Sex, betrayal, feuds, nightmare pregnancies, and more dead dogs swirl through the narrative, underpinned by philosophies of survival among all classes. Hosein evokes all this in rich, visceral language dotted with obscure terms: flabellate, noctilucae, rufescent. His story, often brutal, ultimately tragic, is nevertheless lit by a wide embrace reaching beyond place and people to the bedrock.
Immersive, persuasive: an elemental “portal to the Caribbean” delivered in a distinctive voice.
