When Mercy Chan washes up on the shores of Hong Kong with no family, no money and no memories, the only refuge she finds is the infamous, ghost-infested slum of Kowloon Walled City. Since then, she has rebuilt her life, working for the local triad as a ghost talker and dealing with the angry and bitter spirits who haunt the district. But the past Mercy can’t remember isn't done with her. An unusually powerful ghost has infested Kowloon’s waterways, drowning innocents and threatening the district. It claims to know Mercy --- and secrets from her past that are best left forgotten. As Mercy is drawn into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with this malignant spirit, she begins to realize that the monster she fights within these walls may well be one of her own making.

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon --- like all other book eater women --- is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger --- not for books, but for human minds.