Hungry Ghosts: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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There is rarely a moment when the bison wouldn’t have to do this, and so someone seeing the bison for the first time would think it just enjoys swishing its tail. In the opening chapter, titled “A Gate to Hell,” readers meet four teenage boys performing a blood oath by a river. Along the way, he delicately explores the often tortured backgrounds of numerous characters in his large cast, revealing their motives and desires.

If this happens to you, please don't give up: the book becomes a real pageturner with an intricate plot, lively characters and lots to learn about Trinidadian life, culture, religion, food, weather and nature. Almost every family in the barracks has suffered loss (a list of main characters includes the deceased as well as living). I thought it was a good analogy to explain the character motivations in the book, especially where social mobility is concerned and whatever life you attain; it can never be enough.Picture curry leaves springing into helices; mangroves cross-legged in the decanted swamp; bastions of sugarcane bowing and sprawled even and remote; the spoiled smell of sulphate of ammonia somewhere in there; pink hearts of caladium that beat and bounce between burnt thatches of bird cucumber — all lain like tufts and bristles and pelages upon the back of some buried colossus. On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognizable to those who reside in the farm's shadow. The problem is that Bosmans’s memory is hazy at best; he retains only scattered images from that period, and reality and dreams blur together for him. Hungry Ghosts is an intriguing read that forces us to confront the harsh realities of life and its varying juxtapositions of violence and beauty, love and hate, faith and despair. Shweta is haunted by the loss of her baby girl Hema, about whom Hans will never speak and who has become, as one of the older women in the barrack revealed to Shweta, a "preta -- a hungry ghost" whose insatiable hunger must be appeased, as well as that of the other ghosts Hema brings with her.

Her eyes limpid, tiny black splotches dotting the whiskers, a pucker of scar tissue at her left thigh where she had a hotspot.He is constantly taunted and bullied mercilessly, and when he retaliates, he's the one who gets expelled.

In the book, the poor “barrack”-dwellers, who are Hindu, suffer prejudice from the richer Christian villagers. From an unforgettable new voice in Caribbean literature, a sweeping story of two families colliding in 1940s Trinidad - and a chilling mystery that shows how interconnected their lives truly are. In an effort to protect herself, she hires one of the men from the Barrack to be a guard at the house until her husband “comes back home”. I said before that Hans and Shweta appeared to be a happy couple, but something happened before Krishna was born.High on the list of these complications is the treatment of the island’s marginalised Hindu population, whose rights are curtailed in law. The twin narratives mimic field-work notebooks, with headings by family (Vitaceae, Gentianeae, Ambrosiaceae) and vivid illustrations.