Hunger

A Novella and Stories

De: Lan Samantha Chang

Narrado por: Eunice Wong

Not since Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan has a fiction writer explored with such powerful intensity the experience of being Asian American. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary fictional debut are caught between the burden of their past history and the fragility of their unchartered future. Hunger illuminates how first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment - and how the past affects and shapes their children.

In luminous prose, these stories of love and loss explore the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. The stunning title novella is told by a woman whose love for an exiled musician compels her into a tragic marriage in which her husband's unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children. In other stories, a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death.

Lan Samantha Chang weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family, into haunting tales. Again and again, Chang asks the question: is love not a kind of burden, stifling and terrifying in the choices and responsibilities it forces on us? And yet we yearn for it, define ourselves by our experience of it, cannot live without it.

©1998 Lan Samantha Chang (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A masterpiece

Hunger is captivating! Chang is able to create immense depth with her characters in a beautifully paced narrative.

Perfect match of writer and narrator

This story collection reveals the tension and strains inherent in the lives of those who are transplanted from their old lives to a new and alien culture. Eunice Wong's sensitive and restrained narration brings life to each character as she confides their stories to the listener. Highly recommended.

More people should know about this book!

Six hours of beautiful. The stories are brilliantly crafted, compelling, and capture the beauty of Chinese culture and families. The narration only elevates what the writing offers - bringing tension, heartbreak and deeply felt emotions to the surface.