Book Review: Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan

Namrata reviews Delicious Hunger, originally written by Hai Fan and translated by Jeremy Tiang for Ethos Books, calling it a powerful testament.

Delicious Hunger (Ethos Books, 2025), the quietly searing short story collection by Hai Fan, offers a rare and visceral glimpse into the guerrilla life of the Malayan Communist Party between 1976 and 1989. More than a simple recounting of military action or ideological struggle, the collection, translated with subtle grace by Jeremy Tiang, is a mosaic of sensuous survival, yearning, and the strange, sometimes tender rituals of daily life in the rainforest.

Hai Fan, the pen name of Ang Tiam Huat, spent thirteen formative years as a guerrilla fighter near the Malaysia–Thailand border. That experience pulses beneath every sentence in these stories. The result is a collection that reads like a transmission from the jungle itself, damp, intimate, humming with danger and unexpected grace.