The Hunger We Pass Down
A Novel
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2026 • FINALIST FOR THE JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKES • FINALIST FOR THE CRIME WRITERS OF CANADA PETER ROBINSON AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL
From the bestselling author of Superfan comes a haunting novel about the demons passed down through five generations of women in a Chinese Canadian family, and what it might take for them to finally break free of the past. Will you break your mother's curse before it consumes you?
Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online business, a resentful teenage daughter, a screen-obsessed son, and a secret boyfriend, she can never get everything done in a day. So it’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning to find the counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, and orders are neatly packed and labelled. But she doesn’t remember staying up late to take care of things. As the strange pattern continues, she realizes someone—or something—has been doing her chores for her.
Alice knows she should feel uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who has started to share shocking stories from their family history—beginning with the horrors that befell her great-grandmother, who was imprisoned as a comfort woman in Hong Kong during the Second World War. But the family’s demons—both real and subconscious, old and new—are about to become impossible to ignore.
Set against the gleaming backdrop of contemporary Vancouver, The Hunger We Pass Down is a devastating, horror-tinged novel about how unspoken legacies of violence can shape a family. It follows the relentless spectre of intergenerational trauma as it is handed down from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break the cycle—heroism, depravity, or both.
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This lush and eerie exploration of intergenerational trauma from Lee (Superfan) finds Chinese Canadian Alice Chow attempting to juggle running a business out of her home, having primary custody of her two kids, and developing a relationship with a handsome bartender, all while increasingly drinking too much from the stress. So when she starts waking up to find her home cleaned, her products packed for shipping, and food already waiting for her children, it feels like a miracle, though her theory that she herself is doing all this work while drunk or sleeping and then forgetting about it is thin, even in her own mind. She also can't remember conversations that her boyfriend swears they had; her daughter's night terrors worsen; and her ex-nanny sees Alice transform into something monstrous. Whoever—or whatever—has been helping Alice has its own agenda, and it's not satisfied living only half her life. Lee effortlessly shifts between dual timelines, twining the little agonies of modern-day motherhood with flashbacks to the struggles of Alice's ancestors. After the subtle creeping dread built through the bulk of the novel, an abrupt late-narrative shift into more traditional supernatural action feels jarring. Still, Lee's exploration of the love—and misery—of family is nuanced and emotional. It's a haunting excursion.
