The Hunger We Pass Down

A Novel

De: Jen Sookfong Lee

Narrado por: Christine L. Nguyen

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.

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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