Praise for Diamond Hill
“Shifting between the austerity of the convent and the squalor of the shantytown, Mr. 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.” —Wall Street Journal
“Fan’s evocative debut portrays a Hong Kong in transition…Fan brings poetic language and moving tributes to descriptions of the lost neighborhood…the novel’s aching beauty makes an effective argument for remembering.” —Publishers Weekly
‘’Fan deftly mixes the sacred with the profane, often on the same page. Just when you decide there’s no room for holiness amid the wreckage, you realize there may in fact be no other option.’’ —Kirkus Reviews
“All the more impressive when considering that Diamond Hill is author Kit Fan's literary debut as a novelist. This compelling, deftly crafted, and inherently entertaining story of powerlessness, religion, memory, displacement, and the demise of a city is especially and unreservedly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review
“This gripping debut portrays the territory in flux, witnessed by the colourful denizens of a crumbling neighbourhood…The language veers from the sacred to the profane, and it is a dizzyingly kinetic and occasionally humorous read, with a zippy plot that adroitly balances both the satirical and schmaltzy undertones.” —SHARLENE TEO, The Guardian
“Raw and authentic Hong Kong. Writing at its best. This book is exceptionally good.” —CHRIS THRALL, bestselling author of Eating Smoke
“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 and Us
“An extraordinary book. I can’t remember reading something so terrifying, amazing, moving, and complicatedly fascinating. The characters brand themselves immediately and we know them completely and not at all. The interweaving of the political and the private is startling. It makes such a complete world and shows you how precarious complete worlds are.”—ADAM PHILLIPS, author of Attention Seeking and Becoming Freud
“Diamond Hill’s strong sense of place, its vibrant characters and its firm roots in history undeniably makes it one of the best books I’ve read in 2021. If this is Kit Fan’s debut I have high hopes for what’s to come.” —West Words Reviews
Praise for As Slow As Possible
“Utterly straightforward and lucid, with an oblique dream-like undertow, Fan’s remarkable poems—that seem wholly original, even in their echoes of the various traditions that inform them—intrigue us with their haunting and haunted observations and atmospheres. The assurance of the voice in As Slow As Possible is often startling, partly because of the precision of its vulnerability, and partly because Fan seems to sense something in the language that gives his poems an uncanny momentum and coherence. There is wisdom encoded in these poems that is at once fleeting and revelatory. It is an extraordinary book.”—ADAM PHILLIPS, author of Attention Seeking and Becoming Freud
“If there is something of Marianne Moore’s eccentric edginess in the formal accomplishment of these poems, there is also an elegant surrealism wholly Kit Fan’s own. His is an intensely visual imagination, generous and capacious of eye, but joining its manifold optical stimuli to a corresponding tenderness and complexity of emotional response. ‘How should we unimagine a thing once it’s been imagined?’ asks one poem, and the collection as a whole concerns itself with reversals, metaphysical shifts in gear permitting us a glimpse of origins, of possibilities as yet untouched by the immutable laws of cause and effect. Fan’s is in this sense a recuperative vision, at the same time too fiercely intelligent to be anything other than disabused. The resulting poems hum with intellectual tension like high-voltage wires. As Slow as Possible deserves to be read in the way its title suggests: this is a collection that will lavishly reward careful and attentive reading.”—CAITRÍONA O’REILLY
“As Slow As Possible, Kit Fan’s second collection and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, flies through eras and cultures.”—CLAIRE CROWTHER
“Encourages us to appreciate the minutiae of our lives.”—Times Literary Supplement
“As Slow As Possible accepts that our lives are circumscribed little pockets, or ‘spots,’ of time and the task of the poet is to try and slow us down and notice the magic in the everyday that we take for granted, or are too busy to take in.”—The Poetry Review
Praise for Paper Scissors Stone
“‘Then all things began twice.’ The poems in Paper Scissors Stone are moved by the forces of repetition and release, and are haunted by crossings (of borders, of people, of languages and their written characters). With wit and sorrow, precision and tact, the poems study the essential qualities of places, persons, and their arrangements, asking us what it is to begin twice. The book is a formally beautiful and complete meditation on transformation.”—SASKIA HAMILTON“These extraordinary poems, so assured in their directions, so startling in their clarities, have an eerily dream-like wakefulness. Fan’s enigmatic lucidity is born of a confluence of traditions, both real and imagined. This is not simply a remarkable debut, but a brilliantly accomplished book.”—ADAM PHILLIPS, author of Attention Seeking and Becoming Freud
“Here is a collection of complex work, skillfully executed. The poems, each carefully measured and crafted, when taken together add up to a beautifully articulated body of work. This is the performance of a fully-fledged poet.”—LOUISE HO
2021-01-27
A lost soul is stuck between the slums and salvation.
It's 1987. The narrator is a recovering heroin addict, sent by a dying Thai monk to live in a run-down Hong Kong convent. There, he sleeps in a dark, leaky shed and has sex with a wannabe movie star who calls herself Audrey Hepburn. The world of this novel is a treacherous and liminal place to be. There are still 10 years to go before Britain hands Hong Kong over to China, but the preliminary corruption and squalor are well afoot. Diamond Hill, once a Hong Kong slice of Hollywood (Audrey Hepburn claims to have once dated Bruce Lee), is now a shantytown packed with makeshift dwellings that could scarcely be called homes. The towering cranes and encroaching real estate developers share space with heroin addicts and dealers, the latter including Audrey Hepburn’s teen daughter, who goes simply by Boss. Amid this chaos our down-and-out hero sifts for salvation in a place where mere survival might be a more realistic goal. Fan’s prose is both minimalist and highly descriptive; the darker the spiritual corner, the more light he shines. Here’s the protagonist, fiending for a fix: “I scratched my arms until I drew blood, but seeing my blood only made me crave heroin more. The dried blood smelt like a rare steak. I kept licking the wounds for comfort.” He’s a compelling character with a passive streak; he would seemingly settle for being a keen observer. Instead, like Rick in Casablanca, he can’t help but stick his neck out. Fan deftly mixes the sacred with the profane, often on the same page. Just when you decide there’s no room for holiness amid the wreckage, you realize there may in fact be no other option.
An introduction to a seamy slice of Hong Kong—plus a convent.
