The Hunger We Pass Down

A Novel

De: Jen Sookfong Lee

From the bestselling author of Superfan comes a haunting novel about the long-unacknowledged demons that are passed down through four generations of women in a Chinese Canadian family, and what it might take for them to finally break free of the past.

Divorced 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. It’s all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night.

So it’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning to find the counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labelled. But she doesn’t remember staying up late to take care of things. As the strange pattern continues, Alice knows she should feel uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, Judy, who begins to open up about the dark chapters in their family history—so she can’t possibly have anything to worry about, could she?

Interwoven into Alice’s present-day narrative are the vivid, heartbreaking, and unspoken histories of her mother Judy, her grandmother Bette, and her great-grandmother Gigi, who was imprisoned and abused as a comfort woman under the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during the Second World War. As old, suppressed hurts fester, Alice and her family are left to contend with the unresolved demons—both real and imagined—that emerge from their personal and collective shadows. Threaded with the myths of the Asian diaspora and set against the gleaming backdrop of contemporary Vancouver, The Hunger We Pass Down exposes the grief, loss, and fear we all carry, but desperately wish we could forget.

©2025 Jen Sookfong Lee (P)2025 McClelland & Stewart