Vancouver Author Amrinder Sahota Traces a Path from Family Research to Dark Fantasy in New Novel “The Kindest Hunger”

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Vancouver author Amrinder Sahota has released "The Kindest Hunger," a dark fantasy novel set in a world imagined to precede the events of the Mahabharata. The book came out November 4, 2026.

The novel is the third in a body of work that began with family history rather than fiction. Sahota’s first book, "Sun and Moon: One Tree, Many Names," traced his own family tree back to Punjab, including accounts of relatives named Sardool Singh, said to have served in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army, and Gopal Singh, said to have served in the British Army and died in 1882. Sahota has described those family accounts as part of an ongoing research process, not settled historical record.

That research led him somewhere unexpected: into fiction built around the ancestors he’d been tracing. His second book, "Mrig: Reborn in the Mahabharata, Volume 1," imagines a character reborn into the world of the Mahabharata while carrying memories of another life, his friendships with the epic’s princes forming while they are still children. "The Kindest Hunger" extends that project further back, into a dark fantasy world Sahota has built as a prelude to the Mahabharata itself.

Sahota’s path from documenting a Punjabi family tree to writing fantasy set in Hindu epic tradition is unusual on its own terms, and he has framed the three books as a single arc, moving from family memory toward invented story while keeping the two modes distinct. The release of "The Kindest Hunger" came days after Remembrance Day, a timing Sahota has connected to his own thinking about the names families keep and the gaps that persist once the people behind them are gone.

"The Kindest Hunger" is available now, with book information and ordering details listed on Sahota’s author website alongside a Kindle edition.

Studio CarryOnHarry finds the more interesting story here isn’t the novel itself but the method: an author using genealogical research as a literal plot engine for genre fiction, rather than as backdrop. Worth watching whether Sahota continues building this world outward from his own family tree in future books.

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