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The Hill

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What to expect

'The future of literature is in exceptional, inspired hands'
Michael Cunningham, author of Day

'One of the best new books I've read not only this year but in some time'
New Yorker, Best Books of the Year so Far

'A debut reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping'
Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides

'I don't know how Clark wrote The Hill, but I'm glad she did. I'll be rereading it for the rest of my life'
Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

'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

'I have never read a book that captures the experience of growing up so precisely'
Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, Suzanna spends every Saturday visiting Hillcrest Prison, a place her mother will never leave.

At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is unforgiving of her daughter's crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother's friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party. These women once insisted on changing the world, but are now 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. Told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force, The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, and of a family broken apart by the desire for change.

Critics Review

The Hill is tragic, comic, gorgeously written, and overflowing with life; everything you hope a novel will be when you read its opening line. It's a rare experience when a novel not only fulfills those hopes, but transcends them. The fact that this is Harriet Clark's first novel is not only astonishing, it speaks to the greatest hope of all - that the future of American literature is in exceptional, inspired hands
Michael Cunningham, author of DAY
A debut reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping
Jeffrey Eugenides, author of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES
A masterful meditation on discipline, mothering, revolutionary idealism, and forgiveness, The Hill is also a wry and intensely gripping story of a tender-souled girl making sense of the punishing world she's inherited. The writing is so clear, lovely, and lonely - so gently philosophical - that when I got to the final line, I went back and began again, just to stay inside
Justin Torres, author of BLACKOUTS
Harriet Clark's The Hill orbits the endurance that attends faith and the daily, hourly, micro resiliencies which compose and conduct grace. Suzanna's visionary constancy - despite a phalanx of actors, human and institutional, conspiring against it - felt to me as morally urgent as anything in Dostoevsky. How is it possible for a book with such manifest stakes to also be this funny? This propulsive? I don't know how Clark wrote The Hill, but I'm glad she did. I'll be re-reading it for the rest of my life
Kaveh Akbar, author of MARTYR!
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
Author Harriet Clark
Narrator Maggie Thompson
Duration 7 hours and 57 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781399766388
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
Genre Family life fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Political activism
Availability AU, GB, IE

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