What do you think?
Rate this book
The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland
“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” — Kirkus
In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine. Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.
In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine. Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.
254 pages, Paperback
Published September 29, 2023
7 people are currently reading
263 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 17, 2023
Really lovely and well written book. The author is reflective and honest about the pains of growing up and motherhood but also the hope and renewal and connectedness. Excellently crafted.
June 22, 2025
this book was beautifully written. i picked it up because one of the main things about it is something i heavily resonate with. i ended up crying for probably the last 40 pages. it was a really great read.
My memory of childhood and my teenage years is pockmarked like the living room wall I destroyed, filled with dark spots, amnesiac, as if it were a stream of passing out and waking, passing out and waking. I fear that the story that could fill the nothing is now gone forever, and this inability to access parts of my memory erases my sense of self instead of making it whole.
Who was she, really? And how much of her do I have in me? How much of that inheritance should I be grateful for, and how much should I fear?
My memory of childhood and my teenage years is pockmarked like the living room wall I destroyed, filled with dark spots, amnesiac, as if it were a stream of passing out and waking, passing out and waking. I fear that the story that could fill the nothing is now gone forever, and this inability to access parts of my memory erases my sense of self instead of making it whole.
Who was she, really? And how much of her do I have in me? How much of that inheritance should I be grateful for, and how much should I fear?
October 25, 2023
One of the best books I’ve read this year, this memoir in essays conveys both the deep longing of a daughter whose heart grieved for a mother’s tender care and the distance of a daughter-turned-mother who is miraculously able to find believable, genuine compassion for the woman who was not able to reliably mother her and her brother due to mental illness and alcoholism. Just as Brewer searched for love where she could find it—mothering her younger brother and herself, turning to her beloved grandparents, later dipping beneath bridges and dancing at raves with her punk friends, ultimately moving to the US—she foraged for food in the dark forest, where mushrooms might be edible or might be deadly, and you’d better think carefully before deciding which.
The sharing of Polish food traditions, history, and recipes offer the perfect framework within which to more deeply understand how closely related are a child’s drive to nourish their hunger and feed their vast hunger for love. Given the choice of a full belly or a heart full of mother love, it seems, Brewer might have chosen the latter.
As someone who reads loads of memoir but has a more difficult time pushing through a history book, to me, this was the ideal marriage of the personal and historical. I learned what it was like to experience Chernobyl from a child’s perspective and also the perspective of an adult scholar with the distance of age and contextual understanding. I learned what it was like to live in a communist state where freedoms scarce and food is scarcer and depression and hopelessness are rampant. And yet I learned what it means for a little girl’s heart to burn with the knowledge that she is special—that she is worth more.
This book will remain on my shelf to read and reread, both as a reader who lives to discover words and images so beautifully foraged, and as a writer who has gleaned many craft lessons from it. Brewer is masterful in resisting the urge to tie things up too neatly, and every section break and essay end gave me the sense that this is how good writing is supposed to be done.
The sharing of Polish food traditions, history, and recipes offer the perfect framework within which to more deeply understand how closely related are a child’s drive to nourish their hunger and feed their vast hunger for love. Given the choice of a full belly or a heart full of mother love, it seems, Brewer might have chosen the latter.
As someone who reads loads of memoir but has a more difficult time pushing through a history book, to me, this was the ideal marriage of the personal and historical. I learned what it was like to experience Chernobyl from a child’s perspective and also the perspective of an adult scholar with the distance of age and contextual understanding. I learned what it was like to live in a communist state where freedoms scarce and food is scarcer and depression and hopelessness are rampant. And yet I learned what it means for a little girl’s heart to burn with the knowledge that she is special—that she is worth more.
This book will remain on my shelf to read and reread, both as a reader who lives to discover words and images so beautifully foraged, and as a writer who has gleaned many craft lessons from it. Brewer is masterful in resisting the urge to tie things up too neatly, and every section break and essay end gave me the sense that this is how good writing is supposed to be done.
October 19, 2023
“The Hunger Book” was a lovely, if abstracted, reflection on familial relationships, generational trauma, food, and hunger. Brewer’s prose is rich in sensory details, and deeply contemplates her own traumatic childhood in Communist Poland. Although incomplete, due to trauma-induced amnesia, her accounts are visceral and raw. I enjoyed the glimpses into life in Poland, her metaphors through food (especially through mushrooms), and the honesty of these essays. My only complaint about “The Hunger Book” was that, at times, it felt a bit *too* abstract. The book is a collection of essays, journal entries, and meditations, so it at times feels a bit disjointed. It was a bit hard for me to create a linear narrative in my mind as I was reading, and at times information was repeated multiple times in different essays. However, I recognize that the traumatic nature of the book’s content is difficult to organize in a linear way, so these qualities didn’t bother me too much. 3.75 stars out of 5, rounded up to 4!
January 7, 2024
The title caught my eye at the library and I was satisfied that I had read this book that won the Gournay Prize of 2022. I did do a little research regarding this prize that offers a wonderful selection of other books. The author and her history with her mother is moving, compelling and revealing. To be able to bear a family history that produced so many insurmountable ordeals was in itself a confession not easy to tell nor reveal. I am sure this was difficult to share, remember and detail a past family life that so much affected the author’s life as well as her family. Indeed, there were some very enlightening points of research added in the made me think of factors both internal and external that can change a family and family’s life forever. Being of Polish descent made this book even more endearing as growing up in a Poland, yet again, being overshadowed by outside forces, the another and family seek survival on so many levels. A great read and highly recommended.
September 28, 2023
In this stunning and intimate memoir, Brewer uses a framework of food and recipes, both from her childhood and and as a mother responsible for preparing food for her own children, to question the impact of growing up in Communist Poland with an unreliable, alcoholic single mother. She expertly moves back and forth in time as she weaves Polish recipes and history with her personal narrative. From the beginning to the end I was captivated by her beautiful prose, searing honesty and vulnerability, and indomitable spirit.
April 27, 2023
Memoir of a childhood in communist Poland with food insecurity and an alcoholic mother.
October 12, 2023
Beautiful, painful, and honest work of creative non-fiction that threads togther addiction, hunger, childhood with an alcoholic mother, and life in Poland in the last days of communism.
January 18, 2024
A well-woven memoir, reflecting on motherhood, alcoholism, and Polish life.
May 13, 2024
A memoir of growing up in Communist Poland and the authors relationship with her mother and her mother's alcoholism.
Touching, reflective, and raw
Touching, reflective, and raw
June 24, 2024
Absolutely amazing
July 12, 2024
Reminds what is so wonderful about democracy and good mothering.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews