The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry

Synopsis at www.goodreads.com

A novel for those who loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum, The Poisonwood Bible and The Lovely Bones.

Raped then murdered in Japanese occupied Hong Kong, 1942, Lin Shui's 'Hungry Ghost' clings tenaciously to life. Holing up in a hospital morgue, destined to become a school, just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. 

It is 12-year-old Alice Safford, the deeply-troubled daughter of a leading figure in government. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on the Peak. 

There, the lethal mix of the two, embroiled in the family's web of dark secrets and desperate lies, unleashes chaos. All this unfolds against a background of colonial unrest, riots, extremes of weather and the countdown to the return of the colony to China. 

As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly. She flees to England, then France, in a bid to escape the past, only to find her portable 'Hungry Ghosts' have accompanied her. It seems the peace she longs for is to prove far more elusive that she could ever have imagined.

The Hungy Ghosts is a remarkable tour-de-force of the imagination, full of instantly memorable characters whose lives intermesh and boil over in a cauldron of domestic mayhem, unleashing unworldly spirits into the troubled air.

My Comments:

I  was expecting the usual Asian ghost haunting story. Oh boy...I was wrong. This is the story of Alice instead of the ghost Lin Shui.


Not much were written about how the ghosts makes Alice life miserable. It was mentioned bits here and there of things smashing down and stuffs like that which Alice's family took it as her fault


I find that the story was rather dragging and rather depressing to see how Alice's mother hated her. And how her siblings have problems of their own. Too much depressing things without a hint of light gets me down.