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An electrifying, haunting first novel of a girl caught between her mother, imprisoned for her part in an armed robbery, and the grandmother who raises her.
Suzanna spends every Saturday of her childhood at Hillcrest prison, where her mother, Michelle, is serving a life sentence. Many leave Hillcrest and do not return—women who are released or transferred, family members who stop visiting. Michelle's mother, Sylvie, has never visited and is entirely unforgiving of her daughter's decision to aid in a robbery that led to a man's death. At an early age, Suzanna makes a vow to return to the prison forever—to give herself her own life sentence and live out the truth that family is its own life sentence.
Encircled around Suzanna as she grows up are a cohort of Sylvie's friends who know one another from their days in the Communist Party. As Suzanna approaches adulthood, she goes from preparing cocktails for these lively women to caring for them as they age. Falling deeper into their lives and memories, losses and regrets, Suzanna finds herself torn between leaving and staying, abandonment and loyalty, a future elsewhere and a future spent walking up one hill forever.
The Hill is a powerful and deftly told story of a relationship between three generations of women whose lives have been shaped by punishment. Harriet Clark weaves questions of justice, duty, and responsibility into an elegant and haunting book that is as full of wit and tenderness as it is of loss and heartbreak.
Harriet Clark has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Wallace Stegner program, Yaddo, Ucross, and the MacDowell Colony. She was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University and won The Paris Review's 2023 Plimpton Prize for her short story “Descent.” She lives in New York City.
Suzanna spends every Saturday of her childhood at Hillcrest prison, where her mother, Michelle, is serving a life sentence. Many leave Hillcrest and do not return—women who are released or transferred, family members who stop visiting. Michelle's mother, Sylvie, has never visited and is entirely unforgiving of her daughter's decision to aid in a robbery that led to a man's death. At an early age, Suzanna makes a vow to return to the prison forever—to give herself her own life sentence and live out the truth that family is its own life sentence.
Encircled around Suzanna as she grows up are a cohort of Sylvie's friends who know one another from their days in the Communist Party. As Suzanna approaches adulthood, she goes from preparing cocktails for these lively women to caring for them as they age. Falling deeper into their lives and memories, losses and regrets, Suzanna finds herself torn between leaving and staying, abandonment and loyalty, a future elsewhere and a future spent walking up one hill forever.
The Hill is a powerful and deftly told story of a relationship between three generations of women whose lives have been shaped by punishment. Harriet Clark weaves questions of justice, duty, and responsibility into an elegant and haunting book that is as full of wit and tenderness as it is of loss and heartbreak.
Harriet Clark has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Wallace Stegner program, Yaddo, Ucross, and the MacDowell Colony. She was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University and won The Paris Review's 2023 Plimpton Prize for her short story “Descent.” She lives in New York City.
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Reviews
"Breathtaking . . . The Hill might be dreamlike, but it's far from nightmarish, instead charged with a hushed quality of distillation, lustrous with the obscure meaning of familial romance, plus the sense"
common to dreams