Hungry Ghosts (Bloomsbury, UK; Ecco, US), the new novel by 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Kevin Jared Hosein, plots the misfortunes and secret pleasures of two vastly different families in 1940s Trinidad. Tackling the concept of T&T as a “frontier” in that era, the novel signals a marked evolution in Hosein’s published fiction to date, building on the strengths of his previous books (Littletown Secrets; The Repenters; The Beast of Kukuyo). Hungry Ghosts is an often violent, propulsive reckoning with a Trinidad of the recent past.