Author(s): Ross Raisin

New International Fiction

The new novel by Ross Raisin, a Sunday Times Young Writer of the YearAnita is a talented chef in a high-end London restaurant - who has risen doggedly up the ranks, finally, to sous chef. At home, however, her husband Robert is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. Now Anita will have to make a decision about his, and her own, future- whether to be faithful to his last apparent plea for mercy, or to the person who he once used to be. A decision complicated by ambition, and by the guilt of her own past; complicated also by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life. A Hunger takes us inside the real, untelevised world of a restaurant kitchen; into dementia's fracture of selfhood; and - in a first-person narration which does not use the word 'I' - immerses us uniquely inside the mind of Anita to experience every year of her life, from a young child to the carer of her ailing husband, for whom she must make the most difficult choice of all.