Hunger: A Novella and Stories

Lan Samantha Chang

Jan 2022 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Eunice Wong

About this audiobook

Not since Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan has a fiction writer explored with such powerful intensity the experience of being Asian American. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary fictional debut are caught between the burden of their past history and the fragility of their unchartered future. Hunger illuminates how first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment-and how the past affects and shapes their children. In luminous prose, these stories of love and loss explore the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. The stunning title novella is told by a woman whose love for an exiled musician compels her into a tragic marriage in which her husband's unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children. In other stories, a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death. Lan Samantha Chang weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family, into haunting tales. Again and again, Chang asks the question: is love not a kind of burden, stifling and terrifying in the choices and responsibilities it forces on us? And yet we yearn for it, define ourselves by our experience of it, cannot live without it.

About the author

Lan Samantha Chang is the award-winning author of the collection Hunger and the novels The Family Chao; Inheritance; and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. A recent Berlin Prize Fellow, she also has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Iowa City.

Eunice Wong is a Juilliard-trained, award-winning actor and narrator. She has recorded audiobooks for Penguin Random House, Audible, Tantor, Harper, and others, and performed professionally across the US.