Tobias Hill

'A supremely elegant and ambiguous thriller.' - The Sunday Times

The Cryptographer

Underground

Three decades. Three families. One city. What Was Promised is a beautiful, powerful, multi-layered novel of London and its children, of roots and belonging, and of the collisions that can pull us together and spin us apart

What Was Promised

Among the rush-hour crowds and abandoned levels of the London Underground, someone is pushing women under trains. In his search for the killer, Casimir, a Tube worker, is led ever deeper into this city beneath the city. Below the bright crowds and tunnel musicians is a labyrinth of long-forgotten cross-passages, deep shelters and derelict Victorian stations. Hunting for clues that will lead him to the killer, Casimir is also drawn back into his own past and the terrible secrets of his Polish childhood. In subterranean London, Casimir has gone to ground. But in his desperate search he discovers a chance for forgiveness and the emergence of a new life. Underground is a compelling, intensely atmospheric first novel. It confirms Tobias Hill as an author who, in the words of the Observer, 'writes the kind of fiction that can change the way you look at the world'.

You're ours, Ben. Now you are. Now you're one of us. In Sparta, southern Greece, a close-knit team of archaeologists dig for the buried traces of a formidable ancient power. A latecomer, Ben Mercer, finds himself drawn to the brilliance and charisma of the group. But there is more to the team than he understands, and Ben must decide where his loyalties lie before the decision is taken for him.

The Hidden

Burrowing through the goldsmiths' quarters and hidden archives of London, Tokyo, and Istanbul, Katharine Sterne is on the trail of a ruby, diamond, and pearl brooch once worn by Queen Elizabeth I. Interwoven with the tale of her hunt is that of a pair of Iraqi Jewish brothers who traveled to London two hundred years earlier with fortunes made from an unearthed jar of priceless stones. Spanning two continents and six centuries, The Love of Stones follows three very different people, each consumed by the same desire-possession of the legendary jewel-which binds their stories together in an irresistible quest.

A Novel

The Love of Stones

'People like to think that money and love are opposites. Anna Moore, tax inspector A2 Grade, has come to be less sure ...' John Law is Anna's latest client, and her most formidable challenge. The 'Cryptographer', people call him. He is mysterious and charming, the world's first quadrillionaire, the inventor of an unbreakable code, the creator of the world's first great electric currency. In the new millenium, it is no longer quite acceptable to admire the rich. But Law is both distrusted and admired more than most, more than Anna understands. That will have to change. Rule number one: information is the inspector's greatest weapon. And Anna needs to know - what is it that a man like John Law would seek to hide, and why?

Midnight in the City of Clocks is the first full collection of poetry from this talented young writer born in 1970 and already well ensconced in the literary world. This lively collection is a study of life in various cities: London, from hangover to Underground; Hiroshima, at noon and midnight; and the "City of Clocks," a fusion of cities and ages as the millennium countdown approaches. Written over the last five years, the poems fall into two parts: "Transit," which includes poems of travel and living abroad (particularly in Japan, where Hill spent two years); and "Back to the City," urban, mostly London poems, crammed with a young man's curiosity and eye for detail and story-telling.

Midnight in the City of Clocks

In this latest collection of poems, Hill invokes people and place, mythologizing and demythologizing city lives as they are led. From poignant vignettes and celebrations to urban-pastoral and elegy, these poems extend Hill's romance with London's psychic and surreal fabric. Selected as a Next Generation poet, Hill continues to delight us with sensuous observation and imaginative embrace."Hill's special territory, in poetry and prose, is the 'urban-pastoral' ... his native North London is transformed, with many deftly dark touches, into an uneasy realm of the imagination. Hill clearly appreciated Simon Armitage's storytelling persona; he also drew upon observation of the natural world in ways associated with Ted Hughes. Much of his imagery is by turns delicately 'Japanese', or reminiscent of the heyday of Craig Raine's 'Martian' style. Hill has a romantic dimension in his work that is all his own. As a young man with an intense curiosity about the world, his work is full of sensual images, vignettes of city life - and romance ... these are poems of flirtation and desire."- contemporarywriters.co.uk"The closeup detail taken directly from nature, then skewed through 90° to give the reader something completely new, even unique ... with this third collection, Hill promises to be a real force in poetry, displaying an utterly contemporary understanding of how nature continues to work."- Poetry Review"There is a fin de siècle decadence about them ... not least in their brightly coloured diction, their luxuriant descriptiveness, their louche postures."- Poetry Wales"Superb conjurations of place."- Adam Mars Jones"Compassionate and intelligent ... so full of action and interest and that brings alive such an array of people and places, that it is difficult to believe they sprang from the pen of one writer."- Rachel Cusk

Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow

In an isolated trailer home in the far north of Japan, an old criminal scrutinizes his tattooed skin while he waits for the past to catch up with him. A year later, the life of a young policeman breaks down as he investigates a tattooed corpse and the history of death and guilt embedded in its skin. From the Japanese underworld to midnight in the London Zoo aquarium, Skin charts the lives of people in a world made stark and fantastical. The grief of a young computer programmer who cannot erase the ghostly memories of his twins. The vicious logic of the games played by children while their parents sip drinks under parasols. And London Zoo, where the disappearance of dead animals is blamed on the 'Featherman', an eerie bodysnatcher who passes through London's wastelands and derelict spaces, leaving no trace for the feathers of green humming-birds.

Skin

From PEN/Macmillan award-winning novelist and poet Tobias Hill comes The Hidden, a gripping story of a naive newcomer whose arrival at a high-stakes archaeological dig of ancient Spartan ruins unearths long-buried secrets. Interweaving scenes of ancient Sparta with present-day events in a fascinating study of group dynamics, Hill cuts to the heart of the games people play to stay in control. Written with astonishing grace and power, The Hidden is a novel about secrets and the true cost of fulfilling one’s desires.

'I am following the traces of a great jewel. All its owners are dead, and the jewel is lost...' Precious stones are thousands of years old. They pass through the hands of owners and smugglers, merchants and thieves. Often the hands leave no trace, but they are there all the same: they leave impressions, invisible, like atoms of hydrogen drawn to the surface of a diamond. The Love of Stones charts three lives linked by one such jewel. Katherine Sterne searches the goldsmiths' quarters and hidden archives of contemporary London, Tokyo and Istanbul, following the trail of a long-lost jewel: a brooch of rubies, diamonds and pearls once worn by Queen Elizabeth I. Two hundred years earlier, a pair of Iraqi Jewish brothers travel to London, their fortunes made by an unearthed jar of mysterious and priceless stones. An epic story spanning two continents and six centuries, The Love of Stones follows three very different people, each in their own way consumed by the same desire. At the heart of their lives is the Three Brethren, the legendary jewel that binds them together in a narrative as clear and irresistible as the facets of a diamond.

Tobias Hill

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