Anne Berry was born in London in 1956, then spent much of her infancy in Aden, before moving on to Hong Kong at the age of six, where she was educated. She worked for a short period as a journalist for the South China Morning Post, before returning to Britain. After completing a threeyear acting course, she embarked on a career in theatre, playing everything from pantomime to Shakespeare. She now lives in Surrey with her husband and four children. ‘The Hungry Ghosts’ is her first novel.
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 in 1942, Lin Shui’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ clings tenaciously to life. Holing up in a hospital morgue, which is destined to become a school, just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. It is twelve-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 Hungry 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.
ISBN: 9780007351435
Author: Anne Berry
Published by: Harper Collins Publishers India
For more information, please visit
www.indiabookmart.com
Once Upon a Monsoon Time is the author's recollections of his childhood spent in an old palace by the Arabian Sea and in his grandmother's house in Dehra Dun. The story revolves round his relationship with his father who is as central to the story as the young boy himself. It also records his love of trees and the vibrant life nurtured by them, his explorations of the fascinating stories woven around the palace as well as his grandmother's most cherished possessions preserved carefully in an old trunk, his interesting array of friends and his varied experiences with them as he grows up and begins to understand the world even as his familiar surroundings start to fall apart.
