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

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There was still movement within the dog’s thorax. Her breathing forced and irregular as if she were in her last throes of life. Tarak knelt beside her, desperate as a votary ready to self-flagellate. There are a number of well developed and interesting characters. Shweta and Rookmin are probably my favourite.

Themes of class, inequality, friendship, death, family relationships are dealt with in ways that open up discussion and debate. This novel has so much depth. That decision, initially supported by Hans’ wife Shweta, sets forth a propulsive chain of events that rises to the true definition of tragedy: a tragic hero in his prime who is disastrously brought down by his own flaws, in this case, trying to escape from an impoverished and restricted life. The organic trajectory of the plot is breathtakingly wrenching and painstakingly profound. Four boys ventured to the river to perform a blood oath. Two brothers and two cousins. The brothers were twins, both fifteen; the cousins, fourteen and thirteen. They passed around a boning knife, making clean cuts across their palms. The blood bubbled to the surface like their veins were boiling. They let the blood drip into a stolen bottle of cow's milk. They drank, passing the bottle around until all was gone. Then they hugged each other, a minute at a time, holding on tight as if the world were ending. When it was over, the rains came down so hard that the four boys thought the clouds would fall as well. The force of the water stung the wounds and washed them clean. Kevin Hosein's tale is a remarkable tale of life between the rich and the poor, how no matter how much money you have, you are never truly sated. Instead, you are always looking for or missing something money cannot buy.I said before that Hans and Shweta appeared to be a happy couple, but something happened before Krishna was born. Something that no one ever speaks about, so life-altering that you must read it for yourself to find out exactly what. (SORRY)

It more likely to flood out with the rain comin tonight.’ Tarak let out a small titter, rubbed his cousin’s shoulders. ‘Don’t worry bout them, boy.’ 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. It is not that which felt overwritten but the use of language, over and over, which one might only expect to find in a gathering of lexicographers, or a convention of thesaurus compilers.So the novel opens with this divine call. This novel wasn’t an easy write and it’s not going to be an easy read—you may be tempted to leave many times. Because the world of Hungry Ghosts is hell. Awashed in bodies and blood. And you are about to walk side by side with its inhabitants: Krishna, Hansraj, Shweta, Marlee, Rustam, Rudra, Tarak, Niala, White Lady, and the others. scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse. In their marrow, the ghosts of the indentured. And the offspring of those ghosts." It was Lata. Her trousers catching the morning breeze. A white shawl over her hair. A colander of unshelled peas in her grip. She laid a large jute bag over a wooden crate and sat on it. I have to say that throughout I was willing something good to come from something bad but that might be simply because I am an optimist. Either way the triggering event of Changoor's disappearance is the catalyst for all the other problems and tragedies that occur. Absent too is Hans and Shweta’s infant daughter, Hema, whose death from a rapidly catastrophic illness they never speak about, although their grief remains acute. Krishna, born later, knows nothing of the sister he never met. Elsewhere, other parents and children are lost to one another, and lives are ruptured – Marlee herself has ascended to the position of local lady of the manor from beginnings so insalubrious that they fuel a low-grade but insistent motor of local gossip.