Description
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Biographical Note: "Are there examples of this kind of bildungsroman? A coming-of-age novel alert to the terror of the arbitrary, restless with the very terms of our earthly existence? In our era, two come to mind: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go . . . Now a third joins their company, Harriet Clark's superb first novel, The Hill . . . It is a measure of this novel's lucidity, its honesty and unillusioned wit, that Suzanna's vision of this crowded heaven, shared with her grandmother, is not allowed to rest on its lyrical laurels. 'Like hell, ' Sylvie comments. Or, at least, like prison." --Hermione Hoby, The New York Times "Reading the book, I found myself being lulled into a sense of connection to the prison itself, its eternal promise of containment . . . But like all good literature, something sneaks up on you . . . To be gently rocked into a state of complacency around the existence of mass incarceration is an experience fundamental to being an American . . . Clark's storytelling awakens us to that same knowledge through a child's bewildered and indifferent acceptance of her fate." --Hannah Kingsley-Ma, The Guardian "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 (starred review) "A debut reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping." --Jeffrey Eugenides " 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 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 Let the Record Show "This book is a joy to read: the writing itself is wonderful but the conception is magical." --Vivian Gornick Publisher Marketing: 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 among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna's mother, who will never be released. At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely 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 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 tale 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.Review Citations:
Contributor Bio:Clark, Harriet |
The Hill
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