National Network for Equitable Library Service

Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard believes his charismatic father is infallible. Wild, unpredictable, even dangerous, André is worshipped by his young son, who believes that his father can do no wrong. When the boy discovers his father’s true identity — and the crime sprees and prison sentences attached to it — his imagination is set on fire. Before long, he is imagining himself as a character in one of his father’s stories. At once attracted and repelled, Deni can’t escape the sense that his father’s life holds the key to understanding himself and to making sense of his own passions, aversions, and motivations. Eventually he finds himself snared in the controlling impulses of his mysterious father and increasingly obsessed by his father’s own muted recollections of the childhood he’d fled long ago — his birth to a poor family in the Gaspé, his hunger for excitement and a better life, his crimes spreading out from Québec to the American west, his identity as ephemeral as the wind. Cures for Hunger is a gripping memoir of a young man’s quest to understand the hunger that burns for the unattainable, the story of the heart of a boy looking for the soul of a man and the darkness that he finds within.