Hungry Ghosts: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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Elsewhere, other parents and children are lost to one another, and lives are ruptured – Marlee herself has ascended to the position of local lady of the manor from beginnings so insalubrious that they fuel a low-grade but insistent motor of local gossip.

In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself. Hosein does not lose sight of the fact that his main characters live in a shack where whole families are assigned to a single room. Something that no one ever speaks about, so life-altering that you must read it for yourself to find out exactly what.

Among these families are the Saroops—Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, all three born of the barracks.

To put into brief context—these are the words from the Lord of Dharma to a future king, Yudhishthira.A science teacher living in Trinidad and Tobago, Hosein explains in his author’s note that he drew on Caribbean oral traditions of “ghost stories and dark domestic parables and calcified wisdoms rooted in the bedrock of an island nation. On the hill is the house of Dalton and Marlee Changoor, sprawling and baroque; below, the “forsaken jumble of wood and zinc,” where five families squeeze together in squalor, including the Saroops: Hans, Shweta and their 13-year-old son, Krishna. As Hans, Shweta, and their young teenage son Krishna forego their solidarity with each other, the forces of a nature and entrenched social structure rise up to cut them down.