The Love of Stones Tobias Hill Faber, 396pp, £9.99 ISBN 0571194540

You don't have to love jewels to enjoy Tobias Hill's sumptuous fictional quest for the Three Brethren, a jewel once worn by Elizabeth I, and here lovingly evoked. Jewels are obscure objects of desire, which can represent either their exchange value or their own unique beauty. The literature of jewels has a grand tradition. They can be symbols of a woman's sex, as are Lydia Glasher's diamonds in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda; they can be stolen, as in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone; or they manage to fulfil both functions, as do the Queen's jewels in The Three Musketeers.

Stories of jewels are often detective fictions. They involve a certain amount of theft, betrayal, royalty, beautiful women and hard travelling. Hill's novel contains all these things. The story takes us from Turkey to London via Baghdad, then heads east, from Tokyo to the remote coast of Japan. The quest also travels through time. Queen Victoria has a delightful cameo role.

Hill sets up two central narratives of desire - the tale of two 19th-century Iraqi Jews, Daniel and Salman, and a contemporary seeker, Katherine Sterne - which form the book's spine. The narratives are on collision course, which makes for a gripping read. There are some unforgettably vivid scenes, as well as strong female characters - for example, the aged Glott, atrophied like Miss Havisham, lying slumped in front of Terminator and Blade Runner (both of which are also quest narratives), and the vagrant Martha hidden in flooded darkness, "the box gripped in the cagework of her hand".

Hill often freezes the action, slows the reader down and makes us wonder at a single visual image described with menacing precision. The doctor shows Sterne the murderous blood clot, suspended in a jar, that has killed her mother, and to the child it looks like a jewel: "It is a deep red rose, big as a baby's fist. A drop of paler blood clings to its side." This moment has all the power of a primal scene.

Quest narratives are lost-and-found narratives. It is easy to introduce characters, and easy to lose them, too. Coincidences are simple to fabricate. But you need a strong central character to hold the quest or the multiplying narratives together. Sterne, the first-person narrator, may be a stumbling-block for some readers. Chilly, selfish and unpleasant, she wanders the planet in search of her stones, collecting people and discarding them as soon as they cease to be useful. She is the historian of the Three Brethren, the jewel's slave. Her quest is ironic. The epigraph to the novel is a warning: "A face that toils so close to stone is already stone itself." This uncanny jewel destroys everyone who possesses it.

Sterne has to unlearn the love of earthly gorgeousness, the timeless permanence of stones. And here, Hill reveals an old-fashioned set of values. The groups who are happy and fulfilled in the novel are domestic families, albeit unconventional ones: the Jewish family in Iraq; Katherine's sister with her husband and baby; Hikari, the "new man" Japanese-style, bringing up his two children alone. When Sterne finally searches for a family, I found myself longing for her sinister pursuers to materialise another picaro, just as insane, courageous and obsessed as Sterne herself.

But then, I didn't want the quest to end.

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