In ancient Hindu tradition, a hungry ghost, or preta, is destined never to get what it wants because its mouth is too tiny to sate its appetite. He remembered what his father had once told him – that you cannot let your enemies know you’re angry. The big house on the farm and the barrack below mingle in an unforgettable and resounding tale that unfolds and reflects the art of oral storytelling.

He is spellbound by Marlee and the promise of another world, “his posture almost phototropic as he angled towards her. Although there are partitions between the rooms, they do not allow for any sort of privacy; these impoverished families live with no running water, dress in clothes made of old flour sacks, and cook outside in a "communal yard," also the place for "drinking and fighting. Changoor, so when the dogs get killed, the ransom notes start appearing; that's when Marlee gets the notion to hire Hans to stay overnight to guard the house.He laces every page with tension as he plays with the opposing forces dominating islanders’ lives, exemplified in the clash between poor and rich, between Hinduism and Christianity. It is forbidden to copy anything for publication elsewhere without written permission from the copyright holder. The Saroops live in a Sugar Cane estate in Trinidad; these are old, dilapidated barracks from long ago. Krishna is bullied daily at school, has a spunky heart, nevertheless, and gets excited when his father brings home old issues of Popular Mechanics. Set in Trinidad in the 1940s, Kevin Jared Hosein’s debut novel, Hungry Ghosts, has the mesmerizing power of a tale told on a bone-chilling night.

On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognisable to those who reside in the farm's shadow. Even scarier is when her mother’s best friend leaps to her death from her balcony, or when Claudia learns of the woman who drove off the foggy cliffs near the country house where they vacation. Krishna’s father, Hans, works just up on the hill on the grand estate of Dalton Changoor and his younger wife, Marlee.The language is lyrical and the vocabulary so rich that I actually made a list of words to look up - a confronting reminder of the fact that I am not an English native speaker. On the other was Bell Village, the dogma of a new world, howling and preaching steel and diesel and rayon and vinyl and gypsum and triple-glazed glass. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. This is a story of profound social inequality, pivoting between the family of Hans Saroop, a poor farm worker whose extended family lives in an decrepit plantation barrack with other impoverished outcasts, and the Changoors, a wealthy and childless couple who own a large estate house nearby.