Cures for Hunger A Memoir

Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Ellis 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.

But when Deni’s mother leaves his father and decamps with her three children to Virginia, the boy learns of his father’s true identity. André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. Boyish rebelliousness gives way to fantasies of a life of crime. 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 and longings. Only when he goes off to college, however, does Deni begin to unravel the story of his father’s life, eventually finding the Quebecois family that André left behind long ago.

At once a highly unconventional portrait of the artist as a young man and an extraordinary family story, Cures for Hunger is a deeply affecting memoir by one of the most acclaimed young writers in the world today.

Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of the novels Into the Sun and Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Of Bonobos and Men, winner of the 2015 Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism; and Cures for Hunger. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the LA Times, Salon, Pacific Standard, and Foreign Policy, and he has reported from India, Iraq, Colombia, Rwanda, the Congo, and Afghanistan. He lives in New York.