AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER. 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. Will you break your mother's curse before it consumes you?

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.

“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

“An eerie, claustrophobic exploration of generational trauma experienced by a family of Chinese-Canadian women. . . . Lee’s characters are well-drawn and easy to connect with. This makes it all the more impactful and scary when the ghosts do emerge. With each succession of women, the reader holds out hope that the generational curse has been broken—until, of course, something emerges from the shadows. The haunting is a beautifully paced slow build; the sense of dread is palpable and remains unbroken by the novel’s end. . . . An unflinching exploration of intergenerational trauma, international diaspora, racism and misogyny, Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Hunger We Pass Down is a novel of excellent literary merit and a pitch-perfect ghost story.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“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

“A claustrophobic tale told on an epic scale….Each woman’s story is as captivating—and each character as rounded—as the next. Lee has written a genuinely frightening story of rape, abuse, and neglect. A bold story of intergenerational trauma that creates spooky scares out of real-life atrocities.”
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED Review

“Every woman is a ghost story in Jen Sookfong Lee’s masterful new novel, The Hunger We Pass Down. Five generations of Chinese Canadian women wrestle with a legacy of cruelty, violence and degradation that has drawn something voracious and implacable out of the past and into their homes, their bodies, their relationships, and their lives. Laced with delicious dark wit, piercing insight, and unbridled female rage, this terrifying tale will hold you in its tightening grip until the very last word.”
—David Demchuk, author of The Bone Mother, RED X, and The Butcher’s Daughter

“The Hunger We Pass Down chronicles the path of trauma through several generations of women, as it mutates and adapts like a living thing, terrorizing in perpetuity. But as much as it’s a story about the brutal grip of intergenerational trauma, it’s also very much about the bonds forged by this pain. Poignant and biting and haunted by all manner of unsettling spectres, this one really packs a punch.”
—Ainslie Hogarth, author of Motherthing and Normal Women

"[A] lush and eerie exploration of intergenerational trauma.... Lee’s exploration of the love—and misery—of family is nuanced and emotional. It’s a haunting excursion."
—Publishers Weekly