Diamond Hill
Totally unputdownable and evocative literary fiction
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
'A rapid-fire debut with a cinematographer's eye for detail... Fan strikes a deft balance between agile set-pieces and lingering beauty.' Naoise Dolan
'A vivid, powerful portrait of a vanishing world.' David Nicholls
'Do you know what it was like here? You wouldn't believe the glamour. We had our own film studio, redbrick houses for the stars, even Jackie Chan. Now look at us - the Hollywood of the Orient will soon be gone altogether.'
1987, Hong Kong. Trying to outrun his demons, a young man who calls himself Buddha returns to the bustling place of his birth. He moves into a small Buddhist nunnery in the crumbling neighbourhood of Diamond Hill, where planes landing at the nearby airport fly so close overhead that travellers can see into the rooms of those below.
As Buddha begins to care for the nuns and their neighbours, this pocket of the old city is vanishing. Even the fiery Iron Nun cannot prevent the frequent landslides that threaten the nunnery she fights for, and in the nearby shanty town, a faded film actress who calls herself Audrey Hepburn is hiding a deep secret and trying to survive with her teenage daughter who has a bigger fish to fry.
But no one arrives in Diamond Hill by accident, and Buddha's ties to this place run deeper than he is willing to admit. Can he make peace with his past and survive in this disappearing city?
Beautifully written and utterly compelling, Diamond Hill is a gorgeous love letter that perfectly captures a lost place, filled with unforgettable characters. If you love books by Hanya Yanagihara, Colm Tóibín and Ocean Vuong, you'll adore this haunting and evocative novel.
What people are saying about Diamond Hill:
'The best debut I've read in ages... A glorious luminosity to the writing and the reading experience is rather like looking into a kaleidoscope and giving it several twirls.' Cathy Rentzenbrink
'A gripping and highly accomplished debut... A thoroughly enjoyable and profound exploration of powerlessness, identity and the evolution of a city.' Guardian
'Fan is an exuberant chronicler of a lost time and place... It's a timely consideration of Hong Kong's recent past.' The Times
'An exhilarating and original tale, Diamond Hill marks award-winning Fan as a writer to watch.' Cosmopolitan
'Fan creates a textured, unsettled portrait of a territory facing a decisive ending... The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world.' The Wall Street Journal
'Gleams with pleasurable insights... Memorable moments are sketched by a poet's hand.' South China Morning Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fan's evocative debut portrays a Hong Kong in transition. In the 1980s, recovering heroin addict Buddha returns to Hong Kong from Bangkok at the urging of Daishi, an old Thai monk who helped him get clean. Daishi directs him to stay with the nuns of a small monastery in shantytown Diamond Hill. There, Buddha befriends a teenage gang leader employed by the Triad to run heroin distribution in the neighborhood, and Audrey Hepburn, a prostitute lost in the area's glamorous past, when Bruce Lee movies were filmed there. The novel's tension hinges on the redevelopment set to take place as the era of British control comes to a close (as one character puts it, "The whole city is in a state of violent change, moving from one regime we are used to loathing, to another one we are loath to get used to"). When Buddha finds out that the head of the monastery plans to allow the neighborhood to be destroyed, he questions what is truly worth saving. Fan brings poetic language and moving tributes to descriptions of the lost neighborhood ("Why couldn't a paradise be built out of scrapped wood, cheap metal, and cast-offs...?"). As the characters try to flee their unhappy pasts, the novel's aching beauty makes an effective argument for remembering.
