Insatiable Spirits

Its setting between Sri Lanka and Canada may suggest that The Hungry Ghosts is a book about dislocation and dispossession—a multicultural tale or a story of escaping strife in the homeland (and, for the record, it is all that)—but the dominant force in Shyam Selvadurai’s remarkable new novel is an internalized psychic struggle that transcends geographical or physical space. Time, too.

After all, of what significance are spatial or temporal considerations when the philosophical framework for your first novel for adults in nearly 15 years is a Buddhist myth in which those who desire too much in life are reincarnated as disfigured, hungry ghosts whose appetites may never be satisfied? It is up to well-meaning descendants of these restless spirits to perform good deeds and put the greedy bastards and bitches out of their misery once and for all. The novel is punctuated with iterations of—to use the technical term—the peréthaya myth, and while all its characters...