From the prizewinning author of God's Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman's enduring search for freedom. A Hunger is the story of Anita, a talented sous-chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds – the exciting bustle of her kitchen and her exhausting new role as a carer – Anita must make a decision about her husband's future, as well as her own. Should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick once used to be? A decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past – and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life. A Hunger is a novel about love and sacrifice, and how illness and duty affect ordinary lives. With tenderness and precision, Ross Raisin explores what it means to look after somebody at the end of a life – what we owe to our loved ones, and to ourselves.
Author
Ross Raisin is a British novelist. He was born in Keighley in Yorkshire, and after attending Bradford Grammar School he studied English at King's College London, which was followed by a period as a trainee wine bar manager and a postgraduate degree in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Raisin's debut novel God's Own Country (titled Out Backward in North America) was published in 2008. It was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and won a Betty Trask Award. The novel focuses on Sam Marsdyke, a disturbed adolescent living in a harsh rural environment, and follows his journey from isolated oddity to outright insanity. Thomas Meaney in The Washington Post compared the novel favorably to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and said «Out Backward more convincingly registers the internal logic of unredeemable delinquency.» Writing in The Guardian Justine Jordan described the novel as «an absorbing read», which marked Raisin out as «a young writer to watch». In April 2009 the book won Raisin the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He is currently a writer-in-residence for the charity First Story. In 2013 he was included in the Granta list of 20 best young writers. Raisin has worked as a waiter, dishwasher and barman.
