Hunger

by Choi Jin-young

Translated by Soje

Where to purchase: Amazon | Bookshop.org.

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ARC Review

Publisher: Europa Editions
Pub Date: May 12, 2026

What It’s About

Hunger opens with a moment that changes everything. A woman sees her partner murdered in the street. Time freezes. Afterward, she brings his body home and makes a choice that is extreme and difficult to even say out loud.

The story moves between two voices, hers and his. The living and the dead. What follows isn’t a traditional thriller or a revenge story. It’s a book about love, grief, labor, and how far someone might go when the world has already taken too much.

What Stuck With Me

I finished this with tears still on my face.

I went into Hunger expecting horror. With the premise, I assumed it would be violent and cold. Something built to shock. Something meant to push boundaries for the sake of it.

That isn’t what it was for me.

This book felt intimate. Like grief with no privacy. The cannibalism isn’t used as gore, it’s used as devotion. A refusal to let go. A refusal to allow death to turn love into something tidy and final.

I also think the structure is part of why this lands as hard as it does. The story bounces between both perspectives. You hear her. You hear him. You feel the bond from inside it, not from the outside. It isn’t romanticized, but it is deeply sincere.

There’s a sense in this book that the world has never been gentle with them. Their lives are shaped by work, money, exhaustion, and the feeling that there’s no place to rest. They leave each other. They wait for each other. They survive the best they can. And somehow, even with all of that, the love never disappears.

One of the parts that hit me most was the emotional tension of jealousy and patience. The devastation of seeing someone you love with another person, and the strange, painful certainty that you’re still connected anyway. It’s messy. It’s humiliating. It’s also honest.

What makes Hunger powerful is that it doesn’t moralize. It doesn’t try to convince you of anything. It just shows you what devotion can look like when it becomes desperate, when it turns physical, when it refuses to stay within “acceptable” boundaries.

This isn’t a comforting book. It doesn’t wrap things up neatly. It doesn’t soothe you.

It just leaves you with the question of what love really is when everything else gets stripped away.

Would I Recommend It

Yes. Absolutely.

But I’d recommend it with one clear note: you have to be able to look past the cannibalism and understand what it’s doing in the story. If you go into this expecting pure horror or revenge, you might be surprised by how emotionally intimate it is.

This is for readers who can stomach this level of grief, obsession, tenderness, and desperation without needing the book to soften itself. It’s also for readers who like their fiction a little unclassifiable, where the emotional truth matters more than genre.

If the premise alone feels like too much, it probably will be.

Thank you to Europa Editions and NetGalley for the digital review copy.

My takeaway

I thought I was picking up a horror novel.
I picked up a heartbreak story instead.