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

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Mostly, the book tells the stories of individual addicts Mate knows or has known (prior to their suicides or murders) on Vancouver's less swank east side. Hosein traces how structural inequality fractures the Saroops, a small family living in abject poverty in 1930s Trinidad.

The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai | Goodreads The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai | Goodreads

We see our trade as a means of staving off the inevitable encroachment of the 21st century, assisting communities to decide for themselves which parts of the western world they wish to incorporate (medicine, education) and which they wish to reject (prostitution, drug production, begging and servitude to warlords). They are outcasts who live in a riverside shack because their father, now dead, was a mass murderer, a man “so reptile, that he might have been dredged from a bog”. 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. But in between these moments, Hosein’s ability to home in on his characters’ frustrations and crumpled desires is powerful, more so because he often truncates their inner monologues as if to suggest that they themselves are struggling to confront them. Some terrible, terrible things go on all around us, a lot of it happening to children who will grow up to become addicts.I wish the whole book were just about that relationship so that we didn't have to get to know all these awful people. They are terrified we might enjoy being off their hamster wheel of working three jobs to barely survive, and might see universal basic income as a good idea. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are.

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein | Goodreads

Hosein’s tender characterization of each character’s emotions, desires, and flaws makes for an absorbing read on its own, but his astute portrayal of class, religion and culture is what makes Hungry Ghosts remarkable. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function.She knows it's wrong, so when a monk stops by later, she fawns over him in an attempt to avoid punishment for her sins in a future life. This has less to do with the innate danger of the drugs than with which populations are publicly identified with using the drugs. Readers will become familiar with the claustrophobic but sincere barracks community whose occupants cook, grieve, and dream of a better life together.