Comfort Foods

If you’ve ever been properly hungry, you know it’s a sensation that takes over your whole body. By “properly hungry,” I don’t mean you’ve missed a meal or two. I mean when you’re already slim, without great reserves on which to draw, and you miss meal after meal after meal. This is the kind of hunger that becomes your only concern.

Suzanne Evans captures this preoccupation in her new biography of Ethel Mulvany, a Canadian internee at Changi Jail, the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for civilians in Singapore. “There is nothing like that debilitating, that going-down-the-valley-one-by-one pain of hunger,” she once said. “There is nothing where the body is more vulnerable to absolute capitulation.”

Evans was working as a research fellow at the Canadian War Museum, in Ottawa, when she first came across Mulvany, one of the driving forces behind the well-known Changi quilts, a secret communications system between female and male prisoners. The historian...