The Hill

The story of two extraordinary minds, growing up in prison together. The Hill took two decades to write, and I really did have the sense that the insights of each of those years had culminated in a vantage point that feels totally new. I can't stop thinking about it and demanding that everyone read it

Rachel Aviv, author of STRANGERS TO OURSELVES

The Hill is a tenderly Kafkaesque novel about the cruelties and absurdities of incarceration. A book of tremendous depth and feeling that manages to be equal parts comedy of coming of age and Sebaldian rumination. Lady Bird meets The Emigrants. I loved it

Brandon Taylor, author of MINOR BLACK FIGURES

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read

Tara Westover, author of EDUCATED

A profound, funny, and utterly original excavation of a young girl's consciousness

Sarah Schulman, author of THE FANTASY AND NECESSITY OF SOLIDARITY

This book is a joy to read: the writing itself is wonderful but the conception is magical

Vivian Gornick, author of THE ODD WOMAN AND THE CITY

With haunting moral clarity, The Hill transforms a single prison into a vast moral landscape. Harriet Clark captures the strange, enduring gravity of incarceration - the way it orders time, memory, and love long after a visit between a mother and child ends, long after the prison gates close. This is a novel about what cannot be undone, and about the fragile acts of care that persist nonetheless. It is both intimate and expansive, a work that lingers in my mind as a question: what does it mean to remain faithful to one another in a world determined to keep us apart?

Michelle Alexander, author of THE NEW JIM CROW

A beautiful debut . . . a tour de force

Publishers Weekly

One of the funniest books I have read in a while, with deadpan one-liners, bitterly comic in the way only someone aware of the stakes can make a joke

Harper's Bazaar

The book is an eerie, dreamlike, funny, psychologically acute fable crossed with a nineteenth-century novel (unexpressed ardor, letters burned unread, train rides, consequences), a portrait of childhood to rival What Maisie Knew.

Paris Review

I have never read a book that captures the experience of growing up so precisely

Naomi Klein, author of DOPPELGANGER

One of the best new books I've read not only this year but in some time . . . I recommend it to everyone

New Yorker

The Hill is a beautiful, transporting and eminently wise novel about parenting, care and moral duty. Through haunting, lyrical prose and a singular, charged point of view, it conveys the cost of forgiveness and the greater cost of failing to forgive.

Caoilinn Hughes, author of THE ALTERNATIVES

It has been a long time since I've enjoyed a novel as much as this. Clark writes ambiguity with clarity, makes absence feel alive, her prose consistently sharp and often funny, expertly attuned to the idiosyncrasies and unanswered questions which constitute a childhood. The Hill is a novel about many things-love in its grandest gestures and humble repetitions, belief and cynicism, resistance and punishment, redemption and peace-and ultimately proves just as brave and dogged as the characters it brings to life. The most special of works, unafraid of renouncing accepted wisdoms in order to most faithfully honour the radical commitment at its heart

Jon Doyle, author of COMMUNION

An extraordinary book you should read now, and will read again and again, because life keeps happening in it. This is the kind of reader I want to be, feeling deep down the absurdity in what we have allowed to become normal, how dignified we are required to be in the face of cruelty. That is Harriet Clark's prose at work, to show the difficult and lovely continuum, to make ceremonial the smallest aspects of existence. A reminder to maintain our bewilderment in a world that asks otherwise.

K Patrick, author of MRS S

If you read one book this year, read The Hill. Beautifully written, stunningly observed, aching, tender, madly funny. It changed how I see the world.

V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES