Poured Over: Kevin Jared Hosein on Hungry Ghosts

By Miwa Messer / February 16, 2023 at 6:00 am

“No one in this cast believes that they have a home — they have houses, but they don’t have homes. They were born into this country, they were born into these places, but they don’t feel like their homes.”

Within the rich setting of 1940s Trinidad, Kevin Jared Hosein’s sweeping novel Hungry Ghosts brings readers into the world of two families connected by class, power and mystery. A distinctive new voice in Caribbean literature, Hosein has crafted a story that is gothic, propulsive and will resonate with readers from the first page. He speaks with us on learning the true history of Trinidad firsthand, how the title came to be, his literary influences and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. Listen after the episode for a TBR Topoff from Marc and Jamie.

Featured Books (Episode)
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein
Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Sula by Toni Morrison

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays with occasional Saturdays here and on your favorite podcast app.   

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and this book, Hungry Ghosts, technically the US debut of Kevin Jared Hosein, but certainly not his first novel, and we will get into that a bit. But Hungry Ghosts, set in Trinidad in the 1940s, just after World War Two and this novel, it’s gothic, it’s great, the characters are amazing, it is all of the legacy of colonialism in one novel. Hilary Mantel’s a fan or was a fan I should say, Bernardine Evaristo is a fan. I mean, lots of folks saying lots of very nice things about this novel. But Kevin, I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself and tell folks a tiny bit more about Hungry Ghosts before we get started with this conversation.

Kevin Jared Hosein

Sure, thank you for having me. So hi, everyone. My name is Kevin Jared Hosein. I’m a writer from Trinidad and Tobago, actually, based in Trinidad and Tobago, born here, educated here, the entire works. So for me to be published widely in the US and UK is a kind of novel thing. No pun intended. So I’ve been writing since I was a teenager. And most of my stuff has been kind of dark and gothic. And this is actually my first foray into what would be I guess, historical fiction, and research and things like that. Hungry Ghosts is a story that is based in 1940’s Trinidad and Tobago at a time that not even a lot of Trinidadians and Tobagonians know about. So I had to do a lot of research, to sort of build this world. But the premise of it is basically there’s this wealthy landowner, and his name is Dalton Changoor, he has a young wife, Marlee Changoor. And there’s not much that we know about either of them, both of their pasts are sort of mysteries and Marlee thinks that he is involved in criminal activity. Well, one day he goes missing, and all of a sudden, now she’s getting ransom notes. She’s getting prowlers around the estate. So on the flip side of this, for all this wealth and affluence, there’s a sugar cane estate barrack. And this is where former indentured workers would live and it is actually a multifamily home. And it is pretty much the opposite of the Changoor estate. It’s rat infested, it floods, has a lot of leaks, is basically plagued with disease and malady. And within those barracks lives the Saroop family and this is the father Hans, the mother Shweta, and the son Krishna. And there are five families living in this barrack, so it’s very cramped in there. So Hans works for the Changoor estate. He is sort of like a farmhand, handyman there. There’s also a sense of attraction between him and Marlee, although he is he’s married and has a family. So one day, Marlee proposes that he stays there at the estate, and that he would sit to protect her, but he would be away from his family. The exchange for this is of course, money. And then money is sort of the device here that will be used to move that family out of the barrack. But suddenly, we don’t know if he’s going to stay in the estate or if he is going to actually want to go back to his family. And that is sort of the primary plotline there. But there’s also you know, there’s subplots, but that’s basically the primary stuff.

Yeah, we’re gonna let readers discover the subplots, because there’s a lot of really rich material here. And these sort of main characters, Marlee and Hans and Shweta and Krishna, I sort of want to just focus on them because everything, they’re the sun of this whole story. They are the center, everything happens in and around them, in the context of them. And they’re great, great characters. And, you know, I was noodling around doing some homework before we sat down and part of this story came out of conversations you had with your grandfather, you yourself didn’t really quite have a grasp on what Trinidad looked like, back in the 40s. And your grandfather said, “Oh, no, no wait. Let me tell you.” So. Again, this isn’t necessarily based on personal experience, but you did have sort of that perspective that not everyone gets? Can we talk about your grandfather for a second, and how all of that came about and how that informed this really spectacular world you’ve created?

KJH

Sure, so my grandfather, he likes to talk. But when you ask him for details, he’s very skeptical. He just likes to talk on his own terms. When I was commissioned to write an article about Trinidad, and basically anything about Trinidad, and I’ve remembered since my childhood he’s been talking about the old days and things like that, but a lot of the stuff would be vague, and perhaps a bit strange, and details were not filled out. So I said, Well, I would like to know the details to see if I could structure some kind of parallel between modern Trinidad and back then. There’s actually stuff that you wouldn’t really learn it in school there, you learn dates, and you may learn the types of food or instruments, and but not really these details. As I spoke to him, they got quite ugly, but he would kind of put a flourish or a light on it. And then I was just there with my notepads scribbling down, and this was really for like a nonfiction article. But when he was speaking, a lot of it seemed like fiction. And at the time, I thought he was making stuff up. But luckily, I had a friend who was a historian, and he kind of helped me piece things together. And he was kind of like, a walking encyclopedia of these things. And a lot of this is, you only find it out through talking to people, not much of it is written. If it is written you’d have to go into archives, or you have to dig up in very rarely found history textbooks. I just thought it was a very, very interesting setting, and it was almost a challenge. I set upon myself to write a story in that time, because mostly what I’ve done is young adult literature. And I wanted to have my kind of big, broad, epic, adult literary saga thing. And that was just something, at the time, I didn’t even think it would be published and I just wanted to do it. So, he helped me out with the details and instead of asking him like, about systems and so on, I was like, Well, what did things smell like? What did you hear? What was like daily annoyances that you had. And I use that kind of build the daily lives of, of these families in the barrack.

One of the things I really appreciate about your novel is the way you sort of set up the fact that the Americans have come in, they’ve put in a military base, and that’s displaced an entire community. And that sets off a piece of the story. But that’s I mean, you are so firmly grounded in the community, we’re not seeing sort of how the Brits respond or how the Americans respond. It’s literally the community. And you know, there are some folks who are making what they think are good decisions, because they don’t have a lot of options. One, because when you’re poor, you don’t have a lot of options. But also, the way the community doesn’t always support itself in colonial situations, and you come through it sort of sideways. And it’s not necessarily a story we always see coming out of the Caribbean, there’s plenty of literature sort of in the conflict between whatever the colonial power may be, and then the actual community. You’re just so centered and grounded in who these people are, and their hopes and their dreams, and some of them are great and some of them, you’re just like, “oh, oh, that person did- oh” I mean, I have to say there are moments where Marlee, like, you have to congratulate her for being able to do what she’s done. And you have to give her some credit for being who she is. Can we talk about the characters for a second? I mean, we’ve got this basic idea. You talking to your grandfather, you being part of Trinidad, Trinidad being part of you, but this cast, this cast of characters is so good. Where did you start?

KJH

So, I’ll actually go back to something that you mentioned when you said this community doesn’t support each other. And it was actually something that some elders told me about the village they grew up in. And this was kind of the, I guess the idea I had for some of these characters as I was forming them. So they were talking about schools back then, and most of the schools were missionary schools which mean they’re you know, they’re run by the British, sometimes Dutch and to attend those schools, you would usually have to convert to Christianity, the alternative was to be educated at home or what people would call a cow shed. And when colonialism was ending, and let’s say that, you know, the Europeans moved out, we were kind of left with each other. So people, the community, would show, a kind of fearful respect to the white teachers. So when they left, we were left with, you know, Indian and Black teachers and there was absolutely no respect there. What had to happen, there was those locals who became teachers, they had to dress up like the colonialists. And they had to like put on suits, and this is like the blazing Caribbean sun, right? They had to kind of speak with this kind of accent. And it’s almost like, oh, we didn’t really escape, we are emulating it now, to continue to get this kind of respect or survival. And that became like the kind of game at the time. And Marlee was the first character who came in the story. Where her entire personality in a way is a performance, for a very long time she’s left to her own devices, where the performance is what will have to make her like, survive all of these things. And I thought that was an interesting idea. And so it started with her and everyone else branched out from Marlee. I wanted this this idea, and I believe American audiences can relate to this, Marlee lives in a huge mansion that doesn’t feel like a home. Same thing with Hans and Shweta and Krishna. Well, not so much Krishna but Hans and Shweta, they live in a barrack, there is a shelter, a very poor one, but it is not a home to them, they always feel it as temporary. And that is, I guess, the idea where these characters sprung from. And that’s kind of like what I kept in mind when writing them that this is a house I’m living in, this is not a home, I’m eventually going to end up in a home, and I’m going to do anything I could end up in the place I want to be. And that was what formed, as I said, the ideology of the entire cast of characters.

Part of that, too, is the conflict between Hans and Krishna. There are a couple of different moments where they’re down in town and Hans is not treated well by the shopkeeper and this is not a white shopkeeper, this is a member of his community. But because Hans is Hindu, he’s just treated very poorly by the shopkeeper. And Krishna gets very mad at his father. And he’s just like, why won’t you say something? That guy’s a jerk. Why won’t you say something? Why won’t you do something? And Hans is part of that whole performative, like, I just want to go along and get along, and I just want people to treat me like a person, which is not happening for him and seeing Krishna, who’s, what 13 years old as the story is going on. He’s on that cusp of, you know, sort of adolescence, he’s not a little kid anymore. And he sees what his dad’s doing. And he’s really not having it. And so already, we’re on two sides of a colonial world, right? Because here’s Hans, who still doesn’t quite know how to let go of that whole. You know, if I act properly, people will treat me- no civility has never helped anyone, like it’s just not. And Krishna gets it, Krishna sees right through it. And here’s Marlee also holding on to what she believes is the right thing to do and the right image and everything else. Like capturing Trinidad, not just in the 40s, capturing Trinidad. Because I think there are a lot of folks who don’t quite understand how small this place. I mean, Trinidad is not a huge island. Can we talk about current population? And can we just give people an idea of what it’s like now?

KJH

So Trinidad, Trinidad and Tobago is an island nation and is very close to South America is directly east of Venezuela. And is the southernmost Caribbean island. Right now there’s about 1.6 million that live here, back then it would have been a lot less. So even though it’s like a very small rock in the ocean, there’s a vast amount of history here. And also the stories that the spring out from here, I’m actually quite surprised every time I come across something like this, a lot of it you get from kind of piecing it together from talking to people. And this, this one in particular, especially with the American Navy, that was the station here. And there’s a highway her that actually not a lot of people know why the highway’s name is the Churchill Roosevelt highway, is because, you know, there was the British and the Americans that we kind of take it for granted that is named that. There’s a major highway, and it was really just meant to be used for the American Navy, so they can transport arms between two bases, and nobody else was allowed to use it. So there’s stuff like that, in this country where you don’t really learn about it unless you were to kind of prod around, maybe like, “why is it called that?” Why is it named after Churchill and Roosevelt, and not a lot of people ask, well, when they came here, did anybody have to move out. Someone at the time of writing, when I was planning the book had written an article about a family that had moved out. And they are, you know, at gunpoint, everybody had to flee their homes and occupy this kind of tenement. You don’t really hear about that. Otherwise, you just hear the stories popping up. So that’s kind of what Trinidad is like, that is so even though Trinidad is not, let’s say, the history is not really well known to the outside is not really well known to a lot of Trinidadians as well.

It’s so, so interesting to me. Can we talk about some of the Caribbean writers who may have influenced you? I mean, I know you draw your influences from lots of different places. I mean, you’ve cited Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King, but I want to sort of stay focused on the Caribbean for just a second because I mean, I love Jean Rhys. I love Edwidge Danticat, I love Jamaica Kincaid and Marlon James. I mean, there’s so much really exciting work that has come out of writers either based in the Caribbean or with Caribbean backgrounds. And I’m just wondering how that influenced you as you were developing, because you mentioned earlier that your earlier books are very different from Hungry Ghosts.

KJH

I grew up mainly reading American and British literature. And mostly because I didn’t get to study literature in high school because my school didn’t offer it. And you really only got access to those books, at least, you would think of them as academic not really to read for fun. And it’s only later on, maybe my early 20s, when I was trying to put my writing in settings of Trinidad, because a lot of times I wrote about America, and I’d never lived in America which is weird, or like unnamed suburb or city, you know, and I really wanted to set something in the islands. So I had to you know, you have to you have to read in order to write these things. Yeah. And I started off with, I mean, with some V.S. Naipaul, I mean, he’s not the best role model.

He’s a starting point, he is a starting point.

KJH

So he has Miguel Street, A House for Mr. Biswas and things like that. A few years later, I came across a book that was not well known at all called No Pain Like This Body and this was by a writer named Harold Sonny Ladoo, and his book actually got recently re-released, I think, by Penguin and he wrote a story about this family, you know, this eastern family with very ancient beliefs. It was during, it was set before Hungry Ghosts was, I think the 1920s or so. There was a kind of darkness, a kind of horror-esque darkness that he had in his writing that I didn’t really see in Caribbean literature. And that really, really grasped me. And from there, I knew I wanted to write something like that. And that was what I guess was my biggest influence. I read a lot of Caribbean poetry. I read this Barbadian poet called Kamau Brathwaite, people pronounce it differently, right. His poetry has a kind of kind of rhythm to it, kind of gothic imagery, and very darkly religious imagery that I think has seeped into some of my writing. So, really the influence is a blend of, I would say, British, American and Caribbean and then some Japanese literature.

Oh, who among the Japanese do you like the most?

KJH

Mishima. Yukio Mishima.

Yeah, no, it’s always fun because you know, Tanizaki, when you look at like the The Sisters Makioka, and then some of the short stories, dude has range. Yeah, dude has range. And it’s, it’s kind of fun to think about the fact that that can spread around, you know, the globe, or anything. I mean, it really does entertain me to no end. Because one of the things I was talking to you about before we started taping was the book’s title Hungry Ghosts. And in Asia, this is a really common idea that, you know, an unsettled ghost is a hungry, like, you see the imagery of the distended bellies. And there are all sorts of stories around ghosts, whether it’s China, Taipei, you know, Japan, Korea, everyone has ghost stories, and everyone has a hungry ghost story. And can we talk about the title? Because I honestly, when I saw it, I was like, I need to read this book, because I’m pretty sure there’s a connection here. And I really need to know what’s going on. And I think I’m right.

KJH

Yeah, like in Hinduism, they used to call the Hungry Ghosts “pretas”. And I actually was not, I didn’t first hear about it, but it first entered, I would say, my real life when my grandmother passed away, and we were doing the funeral, usually Hindu funerals last a long time, same thing like weddings. There are several days of it. And the holy man came and he wanted certain family members to eat these rice bowls- when she was in her 80s and a lot of her beliefs were kind of lost onto us. But I suppose the family and my grandfather wanted this for her. Because usually, like when let’s say, a family member passes, like a younger one, you don’t usually hear about this. So they wanted us to eat these rice bowls and I just wanted to explain like, why is this? Basically, you offer it as well, because upon death, upon this transition, there’s this this intense hunger, this intense yearning, almost as if you wish to come back to life as this kind of large desire, because so much has been spilled out of you, now you have this great appetite. But upon that, you know, your throat has gotten so thin, and your mouth has gotten so small. Having these rights also provides company for the one who has fallen, the last one, and prevents them from I would say, associating with bad ghosts. I guess when he was speaking, I wanted to introduce this element into the book, I think just the general idea of, of desiring something so badly, but having no way to attain this thing. It kind of summed up a lot of the characters in the book, where there’s simply no way, like it’s so rare for them to break through and to actually metaphorically feed themselves and to satiate that appetite that they’ve basically just gotten accustomed to the hunger and and to live with it. There are some that fight it. But at the end, you wonder if it’s even worth fighting it, that’s kind of the premise of the title.

Yeah, I think the ones who were fighting it too, learn quickly that they might have chosen differently. But I’d also heard that the original working title was Devotion and I have to say Hungry Ghosts, really, for what this book is and what you’re doing and who these people are, the title just fits so perfectly. It rains a lot during the course of the book. You chose the right title. I’m so excited about this, but also just this idea that there’s no relief. There’s no relief from the rain, there’s no relief from hunger. There’s no- when things go wrong and you have to go to the hospital, there’s a very tiny, tiny set of folks who can help you and even then their resources are stretched. You really have created this sort of claustrophobic, moody, I keep coming back to this, it’s very gothic world where everyone’s kind of just a couple of steps away from disaster. And yet there are still moments of joy, there are still moments of genuine love and compassion. And you know, Hans, Hans learns a lot. Let’s put it this way, Hans learns a lot in this book. But he’s not a bad guy. No one in this book is like a twirling the mustache kind of villain. It’s just everyone’s trying to figure out how to survive. Did you know that this is where the narrative was going. I mean, we know where you started,

KJH

I did. I was coming back to those teachers that would wear these jackets, I guess a part that I didn’t mention was that they would excessively flog their students. And they would, of course, be the villains in those students’ stories, because that’s the way, the only way that they thought they would be respected. It was like a very quick shortcut way that had a very, very bad repercussions. In the end, I would think I was thinking about the mindset of that as like, you want respect now, but you’re not thinking in the long term. And there’s a there’s a saying that someone you know, uttered to me, which was Trinidad and Tobago was really never meant to be a civilization. When these people came together, it was never really meant to be a civilization. When the British brought all these people here, all these different faiths and ethnicities, they were never meant to get along. So by the time they left, it wasn’t really a big concern if we got along or not, right. Those who converted to Presbyterianism, those who stayed in Hinduism, those who came as Muslims, those who stayed to the older Orisha and Baha’i faiths, like we were never meant to do that. And I was thinking of that, I wanted to make the characters into almost their own villains, there’s the police in there. But even that, too, is calling back to respect and things like that. So, getting back to the teachers I was talking about, there is like a looming cloud over them that they have formed. This again each one is a performance. And really the only one, either that you’re keeping the others down, or you’re sucking up to them, and one of the only characters who was true to themselves is Krishna. So it was kind of like the stand oit in there. And well, his his clan, like the twins and so on, because he was the only one that sort of accepted himself and was infuriated that nobody else would fight to claim or to be proud of this, this dimension that he was, that was sort of the mindset. So in terms of the characters, yes, there is no real villains in there. All of the conflict really comes from within these characters, and I guess, whatever ancestral pain that when they would have inherited.

You teach biology to teenagers, I think you’d call it secondary school there, we would call it junior high and high school here. But partially because you couldn’t study literature at college wasn’t offered at your school.

KJH

I did try to get in. I did try to inveigle myself into a program, but it didn’t work.

But I’m kind of curious how your day life, right? Your teaching, and your students and all of those interactions. There’s somehow that has to influence what you’re doing on the page, right? Or what you’re doing on the page somehow, like, where’s this- is their separation? Like, how does that work for you? Because they are two very different disciplines.

KJH

They are and they aren’t, in a sense, like a lot of my love for language comes from actually reading scientific literature. So and they actually quite specific and usually like when, like if I would read in the Origin of Species by Darwin, or Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, like, all these things are not meant to be not just, let’s say like journalistic work, but they were meant to not just capture ideas but also be influential. So there is a sense of writing or like translating all the scientific ideas to be interesting, you have to be interesting to be a science teacher. because some of these ideas are quite complex. I did mention I wrote young adult literature before this. Usually young characters and I do take traits from some students that I encountered, right, based entirely on those with their traits, it has helped in a way. It also has helped me separate, what I would say is, you know, my university degree work life or whatever and what would have been, like a parallel writing career, I was able to separate it like that. Of course, I don’t get the time now to teach full time, I do tutor, I still work with teenagers and so on.

But, also teenagers are fun. I mean, they just they can raise an eyebrow and just like, okay, old people, like we’re taking the world in a new direction. And Krishna is that kid in Hungry Ghosts. Krishna is absolutely that kid just raising an eyebrow at everyone going really? Like we can do this differently. We don’t have to do it this way. And all of the adults are still kind of, I don’t want to say they’re floundering. They’re not floundering. They’re just doing the best they can under very extreme circumstances.

KJH

They don’t know the tools they’re equipped with. That they think that they’re equipped with, yeah, it’s the same with Lata. She has a very, what I would say is like, the idea of women’s rights that probably didn’t exist, didn’t come to mind.

Oh, no. That’s very clear.

KJH

She embodies that to a degree. She does know what she has to survive. But she knows that she’s not gonna take any nonsense from anybody. And that would have been a very, very novel idea for a woman back then. So me using youth and ideas from youth and rebellion, to bring forth what we would call modern ideas now, to that frame.

You were writing this during lockdown, though, right? Do I have that? So the timeline is right. So here you are, you’ve got a day job. Then you’re writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing? When did you know? Because you also mentioned that you weren’t sure it was ever going to get published. But when did you know you had a story that you wanted to send onto your agent? I mean, the book sold for quite a lot of money in the UK. I mean, there’s been a lot of buzz around this novel for quite some time now. And when did you let it go? When did you say okay, someone else can look at this.

KJH

I guess it’s kind of a funny story. Actually. When I signed with my agent, I told him I had a novel, I didn’t. I just wanted to sign. So I wrote 10,000 words really quickly and sent it. I said this is the beginning of the novel and he thought it was good. So I didn’t have a novel and I had that kind of imposter syndrome thing looming over me. I did finish a version of this before. There was actually a horror story version of it, where Marlee was kind of like a chimera like creature and the house was kind of like absorbing people from the barracks. And he said good for a first draft, let’s focus on Marlee and these people and let’s see what we could do. So I actually let it hang for a few months, and then lockdown happened. And all of a sudden, I couldn’t go out. I really, really enjoyed interaction and live interaction. And I found myself almost now, I’ve been depressed, and almost lacking purpose. And I want to restart thisproject. And I’m just gonna write it straight, I’m gonna, redo it from scratch. And it would mostly be done at nights and weekends, to be honest, at no point really, maybe approaching the end when I sent him the first half of the manuscript and he really, really, really loved it. That was when I thought, okay, maybe we have something. Then he worked really, really hard, which put me on this, like, we’ve basically played a tennis match with this manuscript, before he sent it out. And at the time, I was kind of getting the hint that he maybe thought he could do something really big with this. And then he said, Well, you know, he sent it out and he gives the kind of aura of pessimism is like we will probably hear back in a month. Three days later, you know, we got an offer from Bloomsbury, and then a few days later, we got offers from three other publishing houses and my mind was blown, honestly. I was expecting some gas money. Like just to pay for car repairs or something like that. So I didn’t think it would actually change the whole trajectory of my career. So that was nice. Especially all of this happening over zoom and email, right? I get to stay in my house in Trinidad and reap the benefits.

But at the same time, it’s kind of nice to know that you’ve got a lot of reach, you know, there you are east of Venezuela. And a lot of people are about to meet your characters and sit in your world. And I have to say, I get the horror thing, I totally understand why you did that original draft the way you did, but I’m personally as a reader really excited that this is the book that we got, I think, you know, it’s easy sometimes to slip in. And horror is the perfect metaphor for a lot of things right now. There’s enough horror in this book without Marlee having to be a chimera. I can totally see that version working too. But this for me, you kind of made my heart hurt while I was reading this book, and for all the right reasons, and all of that, you know, you’re hoping that people will figure their things out, but sometimes they don’t. Do you miss this book? Do you miss being in the thick of this world?

KJH

I do. I don’t think I will revisit it. It was a lot of work to build this world, I wouldn’t say from the ground up because it’s not like I would have been alive at the time. The number of people who have been alive every time are quite limited now, at least that would have not been, let’s say babies, at the time. I was really, really grateful to get several firsthand accounts of what it was at the time. And to use that to weave, as I said, several notions that I believe is part of the Trinidadian cultural tapestry, at least, what resonates with our culture today. And almost as if origins, but some of the issues that we have today. So it was nice visiting there, it was a bit stressful, because I know that there’s gonna be some Caribbean historian, be like that didn’t happen. And you know, but if it’s like that I did for the drama, or the enjoyment. And yeah, I didn’t seek out like 100% verisimilitude and historical accuracy. But I hopefully captured what we would say is the mood of the time.

Yes, I would say I was very clearly in a world that I had not previously experienced. I didn’t want to let the characters go, even the ones that annoyed me a little bit. And I think you know who I’m talking about, there are a couple where I’m like, I get why you’re here. And yes, we need you. And I just don’t like you, Marlee and Shweta both, I was not ready to let go of either. I mean, and Hans obviously has a huge piece of the story. And Krishna, I really liked that kid a lot too. But I wasn’t ready to let those women go. Because I think under the circumstances, like their lives were just so prescribed by things that were beyond their control. And in some ways, Marlee actually found a way to scrabble out of what could have been a really unpleasant world for her. And I have to give her props, I just have to give her a little bit of credit for being able to not live the life that other people expected her to live. And it’s wild who these women are and what they’re doing. And there are a couple of scenes where they get into it with each other and it’s, it’s great.

KJH

Yeah, I think she’s a character. I’m really excited to see what people think about her, how many people will love her or hate her or both. That’d be interesting to see in the next couple weeks or so.

Yeah, I’m really curious too. I think there are gonna be a lot of people who really, really hate her. And a lot of people have some mixed feelings. I don’t know who’s going to openly admit to really liking her. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that, but she is complicated. She’s very, she’s complicated. And I mean, I do, I like her. I think she’s a great character. And, but there are moments where it’s like, oh, oh, you said that out loud? Oh, you did say that out loud. Okay, there’s one exchange with Shweta particularly where it’s like, oh, you’re just going straight for the horrible thing. Okay, great. And by horrible thing, I mean, the thing that’s going to hurt Shweta the most that said, are you working on anything new?

KJH

Yeah. Working on another novel. One that is set in the 90s is which is a lot easier to write about.

Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine. Where do you feel like you are in the process on that? Do you feel like it’s soonish? Or is it like a while down the road?

KJH

It’s I, it’s taken a hiatus from because of, you know, all the are press stuff, right? It’s difficult to do the two but I’m hoping to finish a draft within the next few months. And hopefully we can do a final version by near the end of the year, we could send stuff out and get some momentum going.

That sounds very, very excellent. Kevin, this was so great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I can’t wait for the next novel, The 90s. Yeah, they weren’t that long ago, but I do want to point out that they were long enough ago. Anyway, Hungry Ghosts is out now. It is Gothic. It is gorgeous. If you loved Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, this book sits firmly in that sort of piece of the world literature. So feel free to pick up both. But Hungry Ghosts is out now. It’s really great. And Kevin, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

KJH

And thank you for having me on this podcast. It has been a pleasure to talk about Hungry Ghosts with you.