The Widening of Tolo Highway

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.

- Professor Adam Piette, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield and author of The literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam

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 O’Sullivan, Writer and academic based in Hong Kong and author of Lockdown Lovers