The Hunger We Pass Down

Written by Jen Sookfong Lee

Narrated by Christine L. Nguyen

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.

 

“Genuinely frightening story of rape, abuse, and neglect. A bold story of intergenerational trauma that creates spooky scares out of real-life atrocities.”—Kirkus, STARRED Review

 

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 30, 2025
• ISBN: 9798899730719

Jen Sookfong Lee

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised on Vancouver's East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, The Shadow List and Finding Home. Jen was a columnist for CBC Radio One's The Next Chapter for many years. She teaches at The Writer's Studio Online with Simon Fraser University, acquires and edits for ECW Press and co-hosts the literary podcast Can't Lit.