The Hunger We Pass Down - by Jen Sookfong Lee

Book Synopsis

Jordan Peele's Us meets The School For Good Mothers in this horror-tinged intergenerational saga, as a single mother's doppelganger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family.

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice can never get everything done in a day. It's all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night.

It's a relief when Alice wakes up one morning and everything has been done. The counters are clear, the kids' rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labeled. But no one confesses they've helped, and Alice doesn't remember staying up late. Someone-or something-has been doing her chores for her.
Alice should be uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who begins to share their haunted family history from Alice's great-grandmother, a comfort woman during WWII, through to Alice herself. But the family demons, both real and subconscious, are about to become impossible to ignore.

Sharp and incisive, The Hunger We Pass Down traces the ways intergenerational trauma transforms from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break that cycle.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Hunger We Pass Down

"In The Hunger We Pass Down, Jen Sookfong Lee deftly leads readers through an intergenerational story of women and the ways in which they are haunted by societal expectations of femininity, motherhood, daughterhood, and unattainable perfection. You will fall in love with the characters as much as you will be haunted by them. Prepare to be pulled apart." --Jessica Johns, author of Bad Cree

"Jen Sookfong Lee has crafted a grueling story where evil is thrust into a family like a knife, unasked for and unprovoked. There are sparks of humanity and love and kindness, but they're merely hopeful flickers against a matte black sky." --Alex Gonzalez, author of rekt

"Every woman is a ghost story in Jen Sookfong Lee's masterful new novel The Hunger We Pass Down. . . . Laced with delicious dark wit, piercing insight and unbridled female rage, this terrifying tale will hold you in its tightening grip until the very last word." --David Demchuk, author of The Bone Mother

About the Author

Jen Sookfong Lee is a Chinese-Canadian author whose books include the International Dublin Literary Award nominee and Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize finalist The Conjoined, The Hunger We Pass Down, The Shadow List, Finding Home, and Superfan, a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. The co-host of the literary podcast Can't Lit, she also acquires and edits for ECW Press. She was born and raised in Vancouver, where she continues to live with her son, and can be found online at sookfong.com.