‘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.
Diamond Hill by Kit Fan
Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic. He was born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at 21. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). His first book of poems, Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the inaugural HKU International Poetry Prize. As Slow As Possible (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. His third poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader (2023) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Twice shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize and the TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize, he has won Northern Writers Awards for Fiction and Poetry, the Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and POETRY Editors’ Prize for Reviewing. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship and the Moth Poetry Prize judged by the Nobel Laureate Louise Glück.
He was a Visiting Scholar at the The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon in 2023.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. He is chairing the selection panel for the Royal Society of Literature International Writers 2024.
He was appointed a Non-Executive Director of the Board of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) in 2023.