Hungry Ghosts

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.