Lucy Hamilton

Lucy Hamilton grew up in Dronfield in the north of England. She lived briefly in Australia, before moving to Hong Kong, where she began work on her first novel, The Widening of Tolo Highway (Penguin Random House SEA 2022).

The novel is a semi-fictional account of expatriate life in the New Territories, set against backdrop of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution. While writing Tolo Highway, she also trained as a Behaviour Analyst, dividing her time between the USA, Asia and the UK, which has inspired her second, work-in-progress novel, Exits and Departures. In 2019, she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield, where she had previously studied English Literature as an undergraduate. She has taught Stylistics at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, and now works at the University of Leeds.

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Published Works

The Widening of Tolo Highway

Published: Jan/2022 | ISBN: 9789814954136 | Length: 248 Pages

ANNA RETURNS TO FACE A PAST SHE NEVER TRULY LEFT BEHIND

It wasn’t the middle but the very edge of nowhere. It was always just a little too still. It is 2017. Typhoon Hato has ripped through the streets of Hong Kong. National Day is looming. The momentum of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution has faded. British woman, Anna, has returned to her old village in the New Territories to search for Kallum, a disillusioned local activist, from whom she has heard nothing since her departure two years ago.

Suspecting he was targeted for his involvement in the protests, Anna widens her search, scouring the streets of Kowloon and the Island for signs he is alive. Alone in her tiny, rented room in the notorious Chungking Mansions, gruesome flashbacks disturb her sleep. Paranoia swells. Memory, delusion, and reality begin to blur.

Against a backdrop of construction works, storm damage and scaffolding, Anna is confronted by a daunting panorama. She may know more about the past than she’s let herself believe.

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Endorsements and Reviews

Professor Adam Piette

Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield and author of The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh University Press)

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The Widening of Tolo Highway is a Hong Kong novel that explores the city as political and mental space at a key and violent juncture in the city’s history, the Umbrella Movement student protests and clamp down. It is also about the intricacies of time, its dimensions, subjective feel, and paradoxes, complicated by the double consciousness that memory and the imagination foster when we return to a place we powerfully experienced as a younger body and mind. This is a sharp and intense study of hauntedness: how we are haunted by violent history, how the city at violent breaking-points in its story shapes desire and the unconscious, and how the traces of empire and colonial ideology also haunt the social politics of our time.

Michael O’Sullivan

Hong Kong based academic, Michael O'Sullivan is author of Lockdown Lovers (Penguin Random House SEA, 2021)

Lucy Hamilton’s The Widening of Tolo Highway is a powerful, fast-paced, sometimes breathtaking, exploration of loss and return set against Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement protests and their aftermath. The novel’s use of psychogeography offers the reader a fresh narrative voice; the actions and thought processes of the characters seem to feed off the crowded streets and futuristic cityscapes of this iconic city. For the first time in a full-length English novel, the young Hong Kong protesters of the Umbrella Movement are remembered. The Widening of Tolo Highway is a captivating psychological thriller in which a young woman’s quest for clarity over the disappearance of a lost friend is constantly being derailed by her own mental struggles and by the elusive geography of Hong Kong.

Michael Tsang, Reviewed in Asian Cha

Michael Tsang is an academic, a writer and artist. He teaches literature and popular culture of East Asia at Birkbeck, University of London.

Hong Kong is often portrayed in clichés as a glamorous, vibrant, multicultural, energetic metropole. None of this applies in this novel as Hamilton paints a Hong Kong so dark, gloomy, unsettling, anxiety-inducing, unfriendly, but still strangely captivating. Her Hong Kong has something “noir” about it; if remembrance is the novel’s main plot, hauntedness is its counterpoint. Whether it is the terrifying experience of running away from gangsters in a New Territories village, or of being locked in a taxi and held hostage for her fare, Hong Kong is not the sort of “world city” that official discourse would like us to believe. It is also haunting because it is a city of distrust.

Link to review