Hello, my name is Kevin Jared Hosein and my new novel is called Hungry Ghosts. Hungry Ghost is
set in the island of Trinidad in the 1940s. Atop a hill lives Dalton and his young wife
Marlee Changoor. In the shadow of the hill down below is the barrack, a structure of rot and rust
where five families live communally. Among those families are the Saroops; the father Hans his wife
Shweta and his son Krishna. One thunderous night Dalton Changoor vanishes and his wife Marlee is
left panicked as ransom notes appear as well as dead rats in boxes when those are broken.
She hires Hans who is the estate's farmhand to act as a nightwatch
but as a relationship begins to form between both of them, so do tensions between both families.
Hungry Ghosts is a novel about class, trauma and religion.
So I would like to share very briefly three books with you that I think deals with language and
words very specifically, and that helped me think about language while I was writing Hungry Ghosts.
So the first book here is The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata.
So this novel focuses on an elderly man named Ogata Shingo and he is nearing the end of his
life. So as he reflects upon his life and a wife that he realise he has never really been
attracted to and his son who is having an affair, he develops a very uncomfortable relationship with
his daughter-in-law. And there's a way in which the author here uses the economy of words and very
simple language to express such complex emotion. I think there's a lot to get out of this book.
The second book I'd like to discuss is one that I think doesn't really need much of an introduction.
So this is the Booker Prize-winning novel by Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other. So this
book concerns the lives and happenings of 12 black British women all varied and intergenerational.
So as soon as you open this book from the very first page you see that Bernadine Evaristo plays
with sentence structure and paragraph structure to maximise impact, kind of like how poetry is. I
think it's very interesting that she weaves these 12 stories together like this into something that
is quite complex and almost Miltonian in nature. Very, very good book. And since Hungry Ghosts is
an ensemble, character ensemble, I used ideas from this, I employed ideas from this in my own novel.
The last book I'd like to discuss is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
So The Road sets you out on a journey on a post-apocalyptic wasteland and it makes you ponder
every aspect of survival. It's a book that also doesn't need much of an introduction. But there's
a way that Cormac McCarthy plays with paragraph structure and words that gives you the feeling of
the cool, barren wasteland that it is set in. So there's a sparseness to his words. There's also a
paranoia to the language. It is as if you cannot even trust the descriptions that he's giving out.
It's good as an entertaining read but it's doubly good if you read it with that context in mind.
So these are three books that I believe helped me form new ideas about language
and that helped me to develop the style of the prose in Hungry Ghosts.
Thank you so much and I hope you enjoy the books.