What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.” This is the kind of book that, upon entering the final chapter, the reader takes a deep breath, holds it, and only lets it out when the last word is read. There is so much to anticipate in the last moments of the story, that it is almost unbearable to breathe.

Hungry Ghosts – HarperCollins Hungry Ghosts – HarperCollins

Will this novel win prizes? Undoubtedly. In fact it is the first book I have read this year that I hope to see on the Booker Longlist. Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist who wrote Funny Boy (1994), which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Cinnamon Gardens (1998). He currently lives in Toronto with his partner Andrew Champion. Boy, oh funny boy, how radically different was this! That's a feat sure but not if you are expecting something specific. This was Arundhati-Roy-in-her-second-novel- level different. Are you sure you are you, Shyam? level different. The older brother christened their union with a name: Corbeau, for the large vulture, a carrion feeder, a bird that stays alive by seeking the dead.A dissection of class, disloyalty, extreme poverty, colonialism, generational trauma, abuse, explosive barbarity, (disclaimer: if you can’t handle reading about violence against animals, don’t go here). Hungry Ghosts opens with four boys doing a blood pact that will make them brothers for the rest of their lives. Do they know what this pact means? How will it impact their individual lives? That is exactly what we find out in this book. I was not surprised to find that the author is a poet. Yes, often the precision and load of language poetry demands will bring wonderful freshness of image and avoidance of cliché to a novel, when poets also are novelists. And for sure, Jared Hosein does this. But far too often. Shivan, a gay man of mixed Sinhalese and Tamil blood, someone who could be a reflection of the author, grows up in a dysfunctional family ruled by his maternal Sinhalese grandmother. Grandma is a greedy, unscrupulous woman of immense wealth, extracted from the misery of others, including her family – she is the incarnation of the perethaya, the hungry ghost who cannot be satiated. And yet the grandmother has a strong emotional hold on Shivan, for she loves him in a cruel and possessive way to the exclusion of her daughter and granddaughter and showers him with presents as the form of expressing her love. She has plans and dreams for him which he does not share in.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Kashgar is a philosophy as well as a store. We are committed to supporting traditional artisans and small village communities by selling authentic handcrafted goods which are personally collected by us. By supporting traditional methods of design and production we hope to encourage local cottage industries which have a low impact on the environment and help ethnic minorities maintain their self-sufficiency into the 21st Century. We are particularly committed to assisting women around the world and to this end have worked with several organisations including the Hua Bin Women's Union of Vietnam, the East Timorese Women's Association and Tikondane in Zambia. Time honoured means of craftsmanship and traditional ways of life are disappearing as people all over the world give up their identity in favour of jeans and T-shirts. We see our trade as a means of staving off the inevitable encroachment of the 21st century, assisting communities to decide for themselves which parts of the western world they wish to incorporate (medicine, education) and which they wish to reject (prostitution, drug production, begging and servitude to warlords). We encourage our customers to think of the handicrafts and artifacts they buy from us as an investment: a piece of history and a way of life that may soon be gone forever.This message about the dangers of ambition, of trying to rise above one's station, should be relegated to the bad old days and not retold except as an example of how religious and social structures are often used by ruling classes to keep those they are oppressing from rising up and demanding equality.