The Hunger We Pass Down - Hardcover

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by Jen Sookfong Lee (Author)

Jordan Peele's Us meets The School For Good Mothers in this horror-tinged intergenerational saga, as a single mother's doppelganger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family.

"Genuinely frightening story of rape, abuse, and neglect. A bold story of intergenerational trauma that creates spooky scares out of real-life atrocities." --Kirkus, STARRED Review

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice 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.

It's a relief when Alice wakes up one morning and everything has been done. The counters are clear, the kids' rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labeled. But no one confesses they've helped, and Alice doesn't remember staying up late. Someone-or something-has been doing her chores for her.
Alice should be uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who begins to share their haunted family history from Alice's great-grandmother, a comfort woman during WWII, through to Alice herself. But the family demons, both real and subconscious, are about to become impossible to ignore.

Sharp and incisive, The Hunger We Pass Down traces the ways intergenerational trauma transforms from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break that cycle.

Author Biography

Jen Sookfong Lee is a Chinese-Canadian author whose books include the International Dublin Literary Award nominee and Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize finalist The Conjoined, The Hunger We Pass Down, The Shadow List, Finding Home, and Superfan, a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. The co-host of the literary podcast Can't Lit, she also acquires and edits for ECW Press. She was born and raised in Vancouver, where she continues to live with her son, and can be found online at sookfong.com.

Number of Pages: 384

Dimensions: 1.3 x 8.4 x 5.6 IN

Publication Date: September 30, 2025