Diamond Hill
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“I enjoyed Diamond Hill very much. It’s fantastically evocative of a time and place, full of vivid images but never at the expense of story. A hugely impressive first novel.”—DAVID NICHOLLS, bestselling author of One Day
It is 1987 and three years since Britain signed the Joint Declaration agreeing to hand over its last colony, Hong Kong, to China in 1997. With that declaration comes the promise that the city will remain unchanged for fifty years. But upheaval is already happening in Diamond Hill. Once the ‘Hollywood of the Orient,’ it is now a shanty town and an eyesore right in the middle of a glitzy financial hub. Buddha, a recovering heroin addict, returns home to find the shabby neighborhood being bulldozed to make room for gleaming towers. Buddhist nuns, drug gangs, property developers, the government and foreign powers each have itchy palms, and all want a piece of Diamond Hill. Kit Fan’s hard-hitting and exhilarating debut is a requiem for a disappearing city, as well as a meditation on powerlessness, religion, memory, and displacement.
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.
