Each week our wonderful staff share the books that they've been enjoying.

Tracy is reading Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang

Hunger is a collection of one novella (the title story) and five short stories, all centred on the Chinese-American immigrant experience. Because the blurb says it better than I can, I will just steal a line from it: ‘Chang untangles how an immigrant can hunger for love, for acceptance, and for what they have left behind.’

I just finished the third story and am having that conflicting feeling of wanting and not wanting to keep going, because then it will be over. In other words, I am loving it. It’s been very relatable, sometimes scarily so, and I am really impressed with how well and concisely she articulates the complexity of immigrant and Chinese immigrant experiences. 

Nicki is reading Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan

I’ve recently read and loved this year’s winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which is told from the perspective of a young woman in 1980s Sri Lanka, as her country sinks into civil war and her family are caught up in its devastating effects over many years. Ganeshananthan has created a compelling narrator in Sashi, who tells a layered story – her own, that of her town, and that of Sri Lanka. Sashi’s occasional direct addresses are a powerful way to implicate the reader – to ensure we are not silent bystanders in global conflicts. What would we do if we were in her situation? I think this is a totally deserving prize winner and one of the essential and most compelling books of the year.