“I read this book with great interest. I would love to encourage everyone to read this book.” —Frits Nieuwstraten, Director, Corrie ten Boom House Foundation The thrilling story of one boy’s quest to find his father and protect his younger sister during the great Dutch famine of World War II. “Sometimes you have to take a chance, because it’s the only chance you have.” Thirteen-year-old Dirk has been the man of the house since his papa disappeared while fighting against the Nazis with the Dutch Resistance. When the Gestapo arrests Dirk’s older sister, who is also a Resistance fighter, Dirk fears that he and his little sister, Anna, might be next. With only pockets full of food and his sister asleep in his arms, Dirk runs away to find his father. As Dirk leads Anna across the war-torn Netherlands, from farmyards to work camps, he must rely on his wits and his father’s teaching to find his way.

A pioneering study on the causes and consequences of the Dutch famine of 1944-1945.

Earlier this year, President Obama declared one of his top priorities to be “making sure that people are able to get enough to eat.” The United States spends about five billion dollars on food aid and related programs each year, but still, both domestically and internationally, millions of people are hungry. In 2006, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations counted 850 million hungry people worldwide, but as food prices soared, an additional 100 million or more who were vulnerable succumbed to food insecurity. If hunger were simply a matter of food production, no one would go without. There is more than enough food produced annually to provide every living person with a healthy diet, yet so many suffer from food shortages, unsafe water, and malnutrition every year. That’s because hunger is a complex political, economic, and ecological phenomenon. The interplay of these forces produces a geography of hunger that Thomas J. Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson illuminate in this empowering book. The Atlas of World Hunger uses a conceptual framework informed by geography and agricultural economics to present a hunger index that combines food availability, household access, and nutritional outcomes into a single tool—one that delivers a fuller understanding of the scope of global hunger, its underlying mechanisms, and the ways in which the goals for ending hunger can be achieved. The first depiction of the geography of hunger worldwide, the Atlas will be an important resource for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in understanding the geography and causes of hunger. This knowledge, the authors argue, is a critical first step toward eliminating unnecessary suffering in a world of plenty.

Felix Hoffman's hunger is both physical and emotional. A Dutch diplomat with a chequered career behind him, he is now Ambassador in Prague in the late 1980s; his finalposting. In Kafka's haunted city, Hoffman desperately feeds his bulimia and spends his insomniac nights studying Spinoza and revisiting the traumas of his past. A child survivorof the Holocaust, Hoffman married and had beloved twin daughters, but a double tragedy has befallen his family; one daughter died as a young girl of leukaemia, the other, who became a heroin addict, has committed suicide. his has wrecked Hoffman's marriage and his life; he has not had one decent night's sleep since the death of his daughter over twenty years ago, and his constant physical hunger reflects his emotional hunger for truth and understanding. When Carla, a Czech double agent, gets into Hoffman's bed, political and emotional mayhem ensues. Hoffman's past and his present predicament are inextricably bound up with the tormented history of Europe over the fifty years since the Second World War. Like Europe, he is at a crossroads, and the signs point to an uncertain future.

“A masterwork of enormous power.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko The searing debut of “one of the most influential writers in American letters…Hunger is a masterpiece, a necessary haunting” (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals). A powerful exploration of the Asian American experience, Hunger weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family into poignant tales of love and loss. Celebrated author Lan Samantha Chang illuminates the lives of first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, who mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment—and shows how their choices shape their children. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary collection, “a work of gorgeous, enduring prose” (Helen C. Wan, Washington Post), are caught between the burden of their past and the fragility of their unchartered future.

Scouring the world’s most remote fields and valleys, a dedicated Soviet scientist has spent his life collecting rare plants for his country’s premiere botanical institute in Leningrad. From Northern Africa to Afghanistan, from South America to Abyssinia, he has sought and saved seeds that could be traced back to the most ancient civilizations. And the adventure has set deep in him. Even at home with the wife he loves, the memories of his travels return him to the beautiful women and strange foods he has known in exotic regions. When German troops surround Leningrad in the fall of 1941, he becomes a captive in the siege. As food supplies dwindle, residents eat the bark of trees, barter all they own for flour, and trade sex for food. In the darkest winter hours of the siege, the institute’s scientists make a pact to leave untouched the precious storehouse of seeds that they believe is the country’s future. But such a promise becomes difficult to keep when hunger is grows undeniable. Based on true events from World War II, Hunger is a private story about a man wrestling with his own morality. This beautiful debut novel ask us what is the meaning of integrity

"Supernatural suspense at its finest . . . It will scare the pants off you." —The New York Times Book Review Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.