Book Club Guide

Hungry Ghosts

by Kevin Jared Hosein · 2023 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

1940s Trinidad — caste, class and colonial-era inequality made visceral
A disappearance that exposes what a community has been hiding
Hindu mythology woven into Caribbean colonial history

About this book

In 1940s rural Trinidad, the disappearance of a wealthy landowner sets off a chain of events that exposes the brutal inequalities between a barracks of poor labourers and the estate that employs them. Hosein's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is a richly textured portrait of colonial-era Trinidad's caste and class divisions, drawing on Hindu mythology and the island's specific historical layers.

Published in 2023, Hungry Ghosts won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Hosein is from Trinidad and has described drawing on his own family's history and the largely undocumented experiences of indentured labourers and their descendants.

Discussion questions

The disappearance of a wealthy landowner sets the plot in motion, but the novel's real subject is the inequality between the barracks labourers and the estate. How does Hosein develop this — does the mystery serve as a lens onto the social structure, or does the social structure overtake the mystery?
The novel draws on Hindu mythology within a specifically Trinidadian colonial context — Indian indentured labourers brought to the Caribbean carrying their religious traditions. How does Hosein integrate this cultural layer?
Trinidad's colonial history involved multiple displaced populations — African, Indian, and others — with their own hierarchies. How does Hosein render this complexity without simplifying it into a single narrative of oppression?
The 'hungry ghosts' of the title suggest unsatisfied appetites — for land, for power, for things denied. How does this concept work across the novel's different characters and their different hungers?
Hungry Ghosts won the Walter Scott Prize. What does it do that earns recognition in historical fiction — and what does it add to Caribbean literature's engagement with its colonial past?