The Hill

Shortlisted for the Air Mail Tom Wolfe Literary Prize for Fiction

After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop prison, Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever. An unexpectedly funny and deeply moving novel about the many ways we punish and return to each other.

Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates along with the other visiting children, each one dressed as if for celebration. Inside the gates are a nursery and a cemetery, watchful guards and distractable nuns, women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released.

Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the prison. Her grandmother’s friends know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler–Stalin Pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.

Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever, but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark’s The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the story of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction.