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

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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. The story opens “sometime in the 1940s” with four teenage boys venturing to a river to perform a blood oath, slicing their palms with a boning knife. Of Caribbean literature, the 1972 novel No Pain Like This Body, written by Harold “Sonny” Ladoo, had a large influence on Hosein's interest in reading and writing. During one particularly vicious spat between Hans and Shweta, Hosein orchestrates the hectic noises of the barrack into a crescendo, until one of the spouses crosses a line—when, suddenly, their neighbors become conspicuously (and intrusively) silent. Meanwhile, secondary characters—other barrack dwellers, bullying teenagers, unreliable policemen, and more—impact events and shade in the “anecdotal tapestry.

Meanwhile, a violent rivalry develops between teenager Krishna and some boys from the local village. Her eyes limpid, tiny black splotches dotting the whiskers, a pucker of scar tissue at her left thigh where she had a hotspot. He has published three books: The Beast of Kukuyo (2017 Burt Award for Caribbean Literature), The Repenters (Fiction shortlist, 2017 OCM Bocas Prize) and Littletown Secrets. The mystery of Dalton’s absence is secondary, for example, to the mystery of his peculiar personality and identity, which is sketched out in a few pages as the book opens.A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. In the opening chapter, titled “A Gate to Hell,” readers meet four teenage boys performing a blood oath by a river. This IS an ‘important’ book, as all those other books which made their way into my mind as I read, were telling me, but the overwriting stopped me from the kind of powerful resonances which those named books and writings created. Set on a sugar cane farm and environs, the book is focused on Hindu families of Indian descent that live in a 10 room barrack-a dilapidated tin and wood structure, with water leaks, flooded floors, rats, a common cooking yard and outhouse, and little to no privacy.

Sex, betrayal, feuds, nightmare pregnancies, and more dead dogs swirl through the narrative, underpinned by philosophies of survival among all classes. Yet a looming cloud of violence and narcissism pervades the island, prompting the reader's urge to scream a warning to the imperiled characters or to hold their breath, hoping against the odds that somehow the goodness of humanity will prevail. Inspired by his grandfather’s stories in particular, Hosein captures Trinidad’s lush flora and fauna, as well as its explosive mix of cultures, races and religions, within a novel that slowly but steadily builds toward a climax of Shakespearean proportions. Life is liminal, Shweta thinks, “all shall breathe in death and breathe out death onto everybody they meet. They drink their blood, mixed into stolen cow’s milk, christening their union “corbeau”, for the large vulture that stays alive by seeking the dead.

Two women, living centuries apart, scour the Colosseum for plant samples in this lyrical, incisive novel. When Dalton Changoor goes missing and Marlee's safety is compromised, farmhand Hans is lured by the promise of a handsome stipend to move to the farm as watchman. Author Kevin Jared Hosein has noted that in Hindu tradition a hungry ghost is destined never to get what it wants because its mouth is too small to satisfy its appetite. On the other was Bell Village, the dogma of a new world, howling and preaching steel and diesel and rayon and vinyl and gypsum and triple-glazed glass. Among these families are the Saroops – Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, who live hard lives of backbreaking work, grinding poverty and devotion to faith.

I completely appreciate that a book set so intensely within Trinidadian geography, complex culture, and linguistic patterns will of course be referencing plants, birds, animals, often using local names, and that characters will speak with their own regional and national dialects.British colonial rule was loosening and there was a transfer of power, which came with its own problems, like cronyism. Hosein sets Hungry Ghosts in the dusky, rural past of the 1940s when Trinidad is on the cusp of reincarnation as a post-colonial entity. At the top of the hill is the comfortable, but isolated manor house of the farm owner and his beautiful, young and lonely wife. Though I'm tempted to believe many 'hyped' books were deliberately snubbed (perhaps to send a message!

Hosein traces how structural inequality fractures the Saroops, a small family living in abject poverty in 1930s Trinidad. The rain outside had stopped, but its apparition still flicked its idle fingers against the galvanised roof.In 1854, one helps the botanist Richard Deakin (a historical figure) catalogue the amphitheatre’s flora; in 2018, the other assists an academic tracking the changes in its ecosystem since Deakin’s time.