Novel

In Saskatchewan in the late 1920s, a fifteen-year-old Ukrainian immigrant named Olena is forced into marriage with Taras, a man twice her age, who wants her even though she has refused him. Stuck in a hardscrabble life with a husband she despises, starved for a life of her choosing, at every turn Olena rebels against her husband and her fate. As Olena and Taras drag everyone around them into the maelstrom that is their marriage, they set off a chain of turbulent events whose aftershocks reverberate through generations. In her novel The Taste of Hunger, Barbara Joan Scott masterfully explores the pull of family, the fallout of thwarted desire, and the power of redemption and forgiveness.

"Raaw and haunting, The Taste of Hunger takes the reader on a tumultuous journey from Ukraine through three generations of women on the Canadian prairies. Passionate and fiercely independent, each woman faces staggering obstacles as she struggles to define her life and find love on her own terms, burying secrets along the way. But not all secrets remain hidden, and when the darkest of all is unearthed--a secret that implicates all three generations--one woman and her husband are forced together to confront it in an alarming way. Beautifully written, tough, tender and unrelentingly human, this is a story that cannot be forgotten."

JOAN CRATE, author of Black Apple.