Hunger and Other Saving Graces

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>When a sixteen-year-old abuse victim flees her childhood home with nothing more than the clothes on her back and a meagre collection of possessions she thinks she is off to a difficult but better life. However as the novelty of freely wandering London wears off she begins to understand the danger she is in. In the subsequent hours days months and years her life is coloured with violence loss loneliness and a feral hunger she struggles to break through.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Told over fifteen snapshots in time she invites us into London's rough sleeping underbelly otherworldly yet hidden in plain sight. Grappling with fear trauma misplaced shame and an aspiration for more than mere existence she fights to return to society experiencing both the best and worst of humanity in the process. Whilst we never learn her name as we almost never learn the names of those on the streets we do learn her story. Of how she learns what it is to be human when everything is stripped away and the limitless value of the smallest pleasures.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The story is at its heart a novelisation of the author's own experiences. In wanting to bring a new-found awareness to the issue of rough sleeping the story is told with a brutal honesty and readers should be aware it contains depictions and themes of violence sexual assault death suicidal ideation and generally distressing events. </span></p>