The Hunger We Pass Down - by Jen Sookfong Lee

Book Synopsis

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.

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"The Hunger We Pass Down is a hauntingly lyrical portrait of grief, trauma, and motherhood. Jen Sookfong Lee's novel is as terrifying as it is beautiful, and it will linger with readers long after the final page."
--Monika Kim, bestselling author of The Eyes Are the Best Part

"Jen Sookfong Lee summons all the monstrous, ferocious power of the gothic to tell a story you don't dare look away from. This is the kind of book that eats your sleep."
--Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love and Magic for Beginners

"Every woman is a ghost story in Jen Sookfong Lee's masterful new novel, The Hunger We Pass Down. Five generations of Chinese Canadian women wrestle with a legacy of cruelty, violence and degradation that has drawn something voracious and implacable out of the past and into their homes, their bodies, their relationships, and their lives. 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, RED X, and The Butcher's Daughter

"The Hunger We Pass Down chronicles the path of trauma through several generations of women, as it mutates and adapts like a living thing, terrorizing in perpetuity. But as much as it's a story about the brutal grip of intergenerational trauma, it's also very much about the bonds forged by this pain. Poignant and biting and haunted by all manner of unsettling spectres, this one really packs a punch."
--Ainslie Hogarth, author of Motherthing and Normal Women

About the Author

JEN SOOKFONG LEE was born and raised in Vancouver's East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her memoir, Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart, was a finalist for the 2024 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award, was named a Best Book of 2023 by the Globe and Mail and Apple Books Canada, and was a TODAY Show Recommended Read. Jen is also the author of The Conjoined, longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; The End of East; The Shadow List; and Finding Home. Jen acquires and edits books for ECW Press.