Skin
Tobias Hill
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.
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About Tobias Hill
Reviews for Skin
Sunday Telegraph
Whether exploring the despair of a Yakuza hitman or the grief of a bereaved father, Hill reveals the pain beneath the shimmering surface. What's more, the repetition of names and locations around the world, and the careful echoing of detail, transmutes these tales into a subtle and stylish novel
Time Out
His prose resonates with the precise, sensuous energy of his poetry. He writes with astonishing assurance
Observer
The poetry of his writing lies in its surprise and precision - a smell of mustard in the flash of a gun, for instance, which would have delighted Nabokov - or an understated lyricism which recalls Raymond Carver ... Already an award-winning poet, Skin establishes Tobias Hill as an important writer of fiction
The Times
Outstanding ... 27-year-old Tobias Hill has written verse about his two-year stay in Japan, and this preoccupation is developed in 'Skin', the longest tale, dealing with the grizzly death of a Yakuza who has a full-body tattoo - most of the corpse has been dissolved with acid, so the detective-hero must identify the remains by looking for clues in the text of his skin. The other stories are equally consuming. Altogether, Hill's fictional debut is a work of great intelligence
Guardian
An antidote to all those frail, go-nowhere exercises in solipsism you might expect from a debut collection ... A distinctive and sensitive first collection from an assured new voice
Independent on Sunday
Excellent ... Hill proves himself adept at evoking foreign voices and locales by accumulating significant detail
Sunday Times