A Hunger

From the prizewinning author of God’s Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman’s enduring search for freedom.

A Hunger is the story of Anita: a talented sous chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds – the exciting bustle of her kitchen and her exhausting new role as a carer – Anita must make a decision: about her husband’s future, as well as her own. Should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick once used to be? A decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past – and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life.

A Hunger is a novel about love and sacrifice; how illness and duty affect ordinary lives. With tenderness and precision, Ross Raisin explores what it means to look after somebody at the end of a life; what we owe to our loved ones, and to ourselves.