Alice Safford, troubled daughter of a leading figure in Hong Kong's colonial government, explores the site of an old army hospital. The 'Hungry Ghost' of a young Chinese girl, murdered during the island's Japanese occupation twenty-five years earlier, awaits her in the morgue's shadows. The perfect host for the parasite, Alice returns with the ghost to the family's luxury home on The Peak. Here, the lethal mix of the two, entangled in the Safford family's web of dark secrets and desperate lies, unleashes chaos. Against a background of political unrest and the countdown of the return of Hong Kong to China, successive tragedies blight Alice's life and her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly. She flees to England, then France, in a bid to escape the past, only to find her portable 'Hungry Ghosts' have accompanied her. It seems the peace she longs for is to prove far more elusive that she could ever have imagined. With its dazzling array of characters, human and spectral, and the numerous twists and turns in their fortunes, The Hungry Ghosts is a rich feast for the imagination, marking the debut of a storyteller of the very highest order.