Diamond Hill

“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.

Kit Fan was born in Hong Kong and moved to the UK at the age of twenty-one. In 2017 and 2018 he was shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize for “Duty Free” and “City of Culture.” He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before completing a PhD on Thom Gunn at the University of York. Also a poet, his second book of poems, As Slow As Possible, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, one of the Guardian’s 50 biggest books in Autumn 2018, and the Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year. He was invited by the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon to be a visiting scholar in 2020. In 2018 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for for his first novel, Diamond Hill. He lives and works in York.