The Hill

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 -- Books of the Year so Far * 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
In this urgent and unflinching book, Tareq Baconi writes with tenderness, ferocity, and clarity at a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. With surgical precision, What Now cuts through despair, disillusionment, and political stagnation to offer a lucid, clear-eyed roadmap to liberation. A manifesto for our movement -- Saleem Haddad, author of FLOODLINES