Tobias Hill

The Hidden Tobias Hill

The objects that surround us tell the stories of our lives, sometimes in unexpected ways. A young Kuwaiti girl is renamed Amerika to celebrate the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, but as she grows older and begins to bristle under the restraints of an ever more conservative society, her name becomes a barometer of her country's growing hostility towards the US. A Palestinian teenager -- preoccupied with his lack of facial hair and his alluring neighbour -- is reluctantly drawn into a botched suicide bombing by two belligerent classmates. A Kuwaiti woman married to a Greek doctor is unable to shake the depression that has plagued her since the birth of her second child, even as the family travels to Greece on holiday. A middle-aged American man dying from testicular cancer looks back on his years teaching in the Middle East, his extramarital affairs and his attempted rape of a close friend - and on the abiding forgiveness of his wife. A Kuwaiti woman returns to her husband and three daughters after being kept captive in Iraq as a prisoner of war for a decade. The recent history of the Middle East - the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the US occupation of Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - provides the backdrop for this collection of short stories. Yet in a region sometimes overwhelmed by geopolitical, military and religious events, these stories are a quiet look at the lives of people in the region. They are personal, poetic stories of adolescent love and yearnings for independence, of the fragility of marriage and the void left by childlessness - and of the uncanny power of objects to reveal memories and tell stories.