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. 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
Jen Sookfong Lee writes, talks on the radio and loves her slow cooker. In 2007, Knopf Canada published Jen’s first novel, The End of East, as part of its New Face of Fiction program. Hailed as “an emotional powerhouse of a novel,” The End of East shines a light on the Chinese Canadian story, the repercussions of immigration and the city of Vancouver. Shelter, Jen’s first fiction for young adults, was published in February 2011 as part of Annick Press’ Single Voice series. It follows a young girl as she struggles to balance her first and dangerous love affair with a difficult and demanding family. Called “straight-ahead page-turning brilliance” by The National Post and shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The Better Mother, Jen’s sophomore novel, was published by Knopf in May 2011. Set in Vancouver during the mid-20th century and early 1980s, The Better Mother is about the accidental friendship between Miss Val, a longtime burlesque dancer, and Danny Lim, a wedding photographer trying to reconcile his past with his present. A popular radio personality, Jen was the writing columnist for CBC Radio One’s On the Coast and All Points West for three years. She appears regularly as a columnist on The Next Chapter and Definitely Not the Opera, and is a frequent co-host of the Studio One Book Club. Jen is a member of the writing group SPiN and is represented by the Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency. Born and raised in East Vancouver, Jen now lives in North Burnaby with her husband, son and hoodlum of a dog.
