She lives in a forest hamlet in Orissa. With a father presumed dead and a mother gone missing, Susanthi Bodra is compelled to become a breadwinner at the age of twelve. Eight-year-old Nelli runs away from her mistress’s home, but is kidnapped and sold into a brothel in Nagpur. Two decades have passed, and she is yet to return to her hamlet Kithapur. Gowravva, her mother, is on the hunt to find her precious daughter. From the home of the Lesser Known Goddess to the chilli fields of a mother who has long lost her daughter; from the plush residence of a powerful minister to a vedic ashram, Nainika Chandra, a journalist and the narrator in Hunger’s Daughters, brings together the stories of young breadwinners from the forest hamlets of Jharkhand, Orissa and Karnataka. The book binds the unexplored shades of poverty and power, with an underlying story of love.