The Hill

by Harriet Clark

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.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary, Novels, Family, Adult Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 2026

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

before reading this book, my perspective is that having a bank robber parent sounds pretty cool. i'll let you know if that changes.

update: i finished. i don't really think so anymore.

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)
(review to come)

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew the author a little when we overlapped in grad school 20 years ago, and I knew that her mother had been in the Weather Underground and had been imprisoned most of Harriet's life. Every once in a while over the years when the Weather Underground came up in conversation (once every six or seven years?), I'd mention Harriet's bright eyes, her sweet high innocent voice, her insightful graceful additions to a Margot Livesey seminar we were both in for a bit (I stopped going after a while), and the unusual history/situation with her mother. Earlier this year I mentioned Harriet after watching One Battle After Another -- and it's possible the success of that film helped her novel come to light when it did, since I sort of remember her working on related pieces way back when for workshops.

I haven't been in touch with her but I remember our interactions fondly and always expected she'd publish something related to her totally unique story, so as soon as I heard about it I marked it to read. I wound up listening to it on Spotify, and although I was a little disappointed that she wasn't the audiobook reader, I very much enjoyed it, particularly the opening with the grandfather, the covert trips up the hill, with revelation of the details about what the narrator's mother had done serving as narrative drive, after which the novel sort of revolves around generational inheritance and at times seems almost fabulistic, with the prison on the hill serving as some mythic maternal abstraction like Kafka's Castle, albeit replete with black Lab puppies. But that's just one thread that runs throughout along with others, mostly involving older Jewish women in NYC.

I finished listening a few weeks ago but resisted writing about it, maybe because I first wanted to read James Wood's essay/review on it in The New Yorker (still haven't read it since my subscription has lapsed), or maybe because I just wasn't sure how to talk about it, in part because I rarely read coming-of-age stories, although this is also a novel of Jewish traumatic inheritance (never really thought of the author as Jewish, maybe in part because of her surname, but her novel is certainly "Jewish,” misery handed down woman to woman).

Anyway, I feel like I need to read it in print to really get a sense of the language, and I probably will one day soon, but for now I'm just happy for Harriet and glad this is out in the world and well-received.

[Lauren W · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply moving exploration of a mother-daughter bond severed by a single, radical decision. Because I listened to the audio format, it took me a little while to fully grasp the premise, but once I settled into the rhythm, I was drawn in.


This is a quiet, somber read that follows Suzanna’s life from a young age growing up with her grandparents through her eventual independence, all while she remains tethered to her mother in prison. The story asks tough questions about the choices parents make and the lives children are left to lead. This is one that lingers.

[CJ Alberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very beautiful and moving to me

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Hill is about a young girl whose mother is in prison for a bank robbery. Torn between two worlds, she is committed to continuously visiting her mother, while living with her grandmother who has absolutely zero desire to maintain or acknowledge a relationship with her mother. I loved the premise of this book, but unfortunately, I was so bored. I know I’m an outlier in my feelings towards this book, but I struggled an immense amount to stay engaged with the characters and the story and was so bored I often wanted to DNF it. I give it points for the writing itself, as the authors writing style is strong, but the story fell flat for me. While I appreciate the look at family dynamics and generational trauma, I wanted more. I wanted more background into her mother’s crime, I wanted to see more of the main character into her adulthood, and ultimately, I wanted some bits to drag on far less than they did. Unfortunately, this one just missed the mark for me. I’d probably give it a 1.5 but we are trying to maintain whole number ratings here!

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly breathtaking debut, filled with sublime prose and interior depth. Yes, it is based on Clark's experiences; no, that's not what makes it good or interesting (though knowing it does add another experiential layer).

[Yalla Balagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harriet Clark gives her narrator one hill to climb every weekend, toward a mother serving time at a prison called Hillcrest. That slope carries an entire childhood. Suzanna ascends through the gates, past the gun tower, into her mother's arms, then descends, week after week, year after year. This girl serves a sentence of her own, paid out in train rides and quarters for the visitor's bag, choosing the role of great stayer over great leaver.

Two figures shape her years on the hill, a grandfather too gentle for the job and a grandmother built entirely for it. The grandfather ferries Suzanna up and down for years. Tenderly checking pockets, removing shoes, performing the search ritual ahead of the guards. He exits the story the way he exits everything, quietly, soon after a pack of prison cats mistakes his leg for dinner and leaves him bloodied and strangely dashing at the gate.

Then the grandmother takes over, and the book finds its true power source. She is magnificent and merciless in one breath, handing out toy warriors for Hanukkah, holding court over vodka with her gathered widows, calling her daughter's crime a debt owed instead of a sentence served.

Her campaign against the hill includes a bank parking lot lecture about checks written by the dead, a fierce insistence that freedom means staying away from anyone behind a fence, and one unforgettable line about shackles at a funeral. She rules as the funniest character here and easily its most frightening. A woman loving so hard she tries to starve her granddaughter of the person she loves most.

Clark moves the way memory moves, looping back, repeating a phrase until it cracks open into new meaning. "Say it starts here," the narration offers again and again, testing different origins for the grandfather's slow disappearance, the effect feeling like a child auditioning causes for grief too large to hold.

A late structural choice, prison letters in italics carrying the mother's voice through the final stretch, pays off completely in one buried memory. A transfer van passes Suzanna's own climb on that same hill in the dark, mother and daughter crossing paths going opposite directions, each certain the other is a hallucination.

Another great moment sends Suzanna onto a train toward Hillcrest, only to ride straight past her own stop. Carried by the sheer pleasure of forward motion into a fantasy of escape, before she finally jumps the tracks and walks the long way back on foot. Here the book's design clicks into place, ascending and descending always two ways of loving the same fixed point. Leaving the hill and returning to it cost the same, and Suzanna keeps choosing to pay.

A graduate of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and Stanford's Stegner program, Clark writes with real control over material easily capable of turning into pure grievance. Instead "The Hill" stays generous toward everyone caught on its slopes, guards and cats included, even the grandmother calling her daughter a killer while quietly hoping to bring her home.

A small, stubborn work about a family rebuilt sideways by incarceration, this book climbs its own title one weekend at a time and reaches the top fair and square. This is not the kind of book I would normally pick up, but the reviews were intriguing and glowing. I'm glad I did and hope you do too.





❤️ 🇮🇱

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE HILL
Harriet Clark
Thank you to @fsgbooks for sending me a surprise free copy of this for review

I should have absolutely adored this, and I did at first. The blurbs on the back are as good, as serious, as true as they come for describing the beginning of this novel.

When I experience the assured confidence of Marilynne Robinson’s fiction in twisting, beautifully involuted sentences and flowing narrative, I’m ready to settle in for a novel-lover’s novel and just relish every bit of it.

I thoroughly did, too, for about 60 pages. I couldn’t tell you after that what happened, whether it was a shift in the book or just a complete loss of interest, whether it was a narrative set up for one thing that turns into something else, or just a dry plodding plot that lost me. It did.

I was underlining and marking and highlighting right out of the gate, so sure this was an easy end of the year top ten, and now looking back over my time with it, I’m left underwhelmed.

A beautiful then stolid work that had hints of Robinson as well as The Notebook (Agota Kristof) and even reminded me of some of the Dorthe Nors sentences I’ve read, this meditation on imprisonment and inheritance through three generations of women really did end up a bit of a Sisyphean task for me in the end.

Nonetheless, were this book to end up stickered, applauded and awarded; were it to find a large crowd of bookstagram love, you’d find me in this book’s corner clapping. There’s something so special about how it takes off, and something gentle and touching about the landing that I truly think had the makings of a capital-G-Great novel. I just couldn’t find it in there.

[Chelsea Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.*

The Hill follows Suzanna Klein as a child as she lives with her grandparents because her mother is in prison. Suzanna was only a baby when her mother robbed a bank with a group of radicals and now, every Saturday, Suzanna visits her mother in prison. Suzanna’s mother will never be released and when Suzanna’s grandfather dies it is up to her grandmother to raise her. Suzanna’s grandmother will not visit her daughter in prison and she is a difficult woman to be around. Suzanna is surrounded by her grandmother’s friends who know each other from their years in the communist party. Suzanna’s mother wants Suzanna to be free but Suzanna finds herself drawn to the prison and her mother.

I really enjoyed reading this novel and I appreciate the story as a whole. It was easy to understand Suzanna and this book is really just about her and how she lives her life despite her circumstances. Suzanna’s grandmother wasn’t the nicest character but there were some sweet moments that I liked. I don’t really have much to say about this book because you really just have to read this story and appreciate it in its entirety. The author’s note at the end also makes you appreciate this story more and recognise its importance.

Favourite Quote - “Do you want me to watch you walk to the train?” my grandmother asked on the first day of the new school year. She was still in bed and I assumed she would, if anything, watch me through the window. But when I walked out of the building, crossed the street, and looked up, there she was on the terrace. Her housecoat gave her the solid folded look of a hero. I waved so that she knew which figure was me. Then I walked the three blocks to the train—she was there on the terrace each time I looked back—and it was only when I walked down the stairs into the dark of the subway that my grandmother disappeared and the whole world closed in around me.

[cursedb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I literally cried while reading this book and had goosebumps throughout.We follow the main character from childhood into her teenage years, and her experiences, along with the family dynamics surrounding her, are incredibly powerful. Although her circumstances are often harsh and heartbreaking, they are portrayed beautifully. What makes the story especially compelling is seeing how she responds to those circumstances and how her experiences shape both her identity and her future.The depiction of prison life is particularly striking, especially because it is shown through the eyes of a child and within the context of a mother–daughter relationship. As the story progresses, we also see how changes within the prison system and broader governmental structures affect not only the main character but everyone around her. It’s an important perspective that deserves far more attention.
This was an emotionally difficult read. The family dynamics make it even more painful at times, and there were many moments that genuinely broke my heart.
Still, I loved it deeply, and I’m grateful that the ending offered at least a small sense of comfort after such an emotional journey.

[Laura Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

3🌟 This is a different kind of coming of age story. Suzanna’s mother is in prison for robbing a bank. Susanna lives with her grandmother. All of this makes for somewhat of a melancholy read. The grandmother and the mother hate each other and 15 year old Suzanna is trying navigate through the best she can. None of it made sense to me. None of the characters were likable. All of it seemed super chaotic and never really resonated with me. I honestly don’t get the cover. Maybe it’s me and this is way over my head.🤷🏼‍♀️ NetGalley and Macmillan Audio provided me with the ALC.

[Alena · Rating 4 out of 5]

What did I just read? This slim novel is such a slow burn that I almost gave up in the first 100 pages. The hook is a good one - at 8 years old Suzanna vows to climb the hill every single week to visit her imprisoned mother. But there's not much “plot” to follow. Instead, we stay very much inside her head as she observes her mom's imprisonment, her grandmother’s cold distance and the aging and death of her grandparents’ friends. All the while, she stays.

A life is a thing you have to start, Suzanna. No one else can start it for you.
I had crested time's peak, gone where my family went, stayed where they stayed, had accomplished these feats again and again, and still the counselor took my commitments as fearfulness, my will for laziness.

What kept me turning pages was the quality writing, the honest look at the courage it takes to stay, or to leave. The ways we are moored and unmoored by family and obligation and loyalty.
Weird and well-written. Lonely and sparse. This book won't be for everyone but I found it oddly satisfying for a rainy weekend.

Of all the ways of being lonely, hearing that life could have been otherwise is one and hearing the person beside you wish that it were is another.

It wasn't until the afterword that I learned this author’s mother was imprisoned for most of her life - that adds a whole different perspective to this novel.

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A coming-of-age story of a girl whose mother has been in prison for all of her awareness. A remarkable debut novel, told from a perspective I have never before seen in fiction (and with which the author apparently has firsthand knowledge).

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was enamored with this at the start. At the relationship between this young girl and the mother locked away for life at the top of the hill, at the relationship between this young girl and the prison, the relationship between the young girl and the grandfather who takes her to the hill every week but who does not speak to the daughter behind bars, and at the relationship between the young girl and the grandmother who refuses to even drive by said hill, let alone venture there for a visit.

There's a wit, an absurdist filter to the writing that creates a distinctive tone throughout. I love a precocious narrator, I love reading about relationship dynamics between the young and the old and the way that being raised by grandparents influences one's upbringing. It at felt fresh, exciting, compelling at the start and then it sort of just fizzled out, never quite capturing me again in the same way it did at the start

At its best, it examines the absurd ways in which a prison becomes something like a home, a stable place for a child that contains the whole universe of all that exists between mother and daughter. And it is absurd, this familiarity that forms after years of weekly visits, and the fact that this familiarity is a comfort. The child grows up knowing nothing else and lives a life defined by the decisions of other people, complacent within this life but consequently struggling to forge a path of her own, or more realistically, struggling to recognize that she can and should forge a path of her own.

It meanders a bit too much, spending too long in the lives of the grandmother's friends and the humor that tickled me at the start becomes a bit tired after almost 300 pages with little variance. I very much enjoyed reading interviews and articles with the author and about her own mother locked away for decades after an attempted robbery gone wrong and how this came to influence the novel, but in the end I didn't love the book as much as I expected to.

Thank you to the FSG for the finished copy!

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story follows a young girl growing up with a mother who is in prison for life. She lives in New York with her difficult grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughters crime, and every Saturday climbs the hill to visit her mother.

The prose and writing is truly beautiful, and I felt was quite unique. I enjoyed the exploration of seeing your parent once a week, and I enjoyed reading about the prison system - at one point her mother gets to be part of a training programme for guide dogs and I found that part so interesting. It was definitely a touching story, especially knowing the author is drawing from her own experiences with an incarcerated mother.

However, I struggled to be engaged with this. I’m trying to work out exactly why, but whenever I put it down, i had to force myself to pick it back up, and I wasn’t driven to keep reading. The writing does leave you with some gaps to fill in yourself, which maybe I struggled with. I didn’t find myself very connected to any of the characters, aside from maybe the mother, and therefore in a story that is deeply introspective rather than plot heavy, it was hard for me to truly enjoy reading it.

I’m definitely in the minority here, as I’ve seen a lot of glowing reviews, so if you are drawn to this premise I wouldn’t let my experience put you off!

Thanks to FSG and netgalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[emily wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe this just wasn’t for me? I found most characters to be unlikable, and while I was trying to sift through my general dislike, confusion, and all the weird ways suzanna was treated to find the story’s depth, I just never found my way there:(

[Sophia Eck · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I don't want to leave or be left."

Suzanna spends her time equally between living with her grandparents and visiting her mother in prison, a prison up atop a great hill; "One must imagine Sisyphus happy. "A quote by Albert Camus referenced at the start.

Slowly gains in poignancy and lett me crying by the end.
Will hit especially for those who
mourn a moment before it is over, those who burrow inside their own complacency, who meekly want things to stay the same forever, even at certain costs.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous novel following a girl whose mother is in prison and who lives with her mother’s mother (her grandmother). We follow our narrator from her early childhood into her early adolescence and we get a really honest look into generational trauma between the three women. There are moments the story is a bit more abstract and other moments it feels more grounded. It reminded me of Deborah Levy a little bit.

Out May 5th!

[Isabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read “Descent” in the Paris Review in September and became incredibly enthused by it. So I was looking forward to the publication of this book in a crazy way. I guess I’ve been feeling despairing about the state of the novel or something, and what I wanted was something so undeniably excellent that it would relieve me of this despair—so when I learned that Harriet Clark was writing a novel, I thought, here we go.

It’s the first time I’ve known in advance a novel’s publication date, was counting down the days to it.

It wasn’t quite all I wanted it to be. That’s ok. Mostly, I felt that this book was operating by its own set of laws, which I never fully learned and therefore wasn’t able to adjust myself to. Which made me feel sometimes like I was outside the book and not inside of it. I think this has to do with certain sentence patterns and also the scene/summary divide but I won’t get into all that. I mean, it was beautiful, and I admired how beautiful it was. Also, how serious. And its density of thoughtfulness.

I finished this on my way from Tokyo to Hangzhou. I started really crying on the plane. I cried all the way through to the novel’s end—including the acknowledgements. I don’t know how to talk about the last few pages. I guess part of it, though, was because I was thinking about how amazing it is to write an entire novel, that it’s the kind of thing you dedicate your life towards, and Harriet Clark worked on this novel for twenty years, which is an unfathomably long time. All that time and all that effort. It suddenly seemed to me like a miracle.

[Lungstrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected. It was more careful, quieter. It rose slowly, like water in a reservoir. By the end, I was swimming in this beautiful and devastating lake full of clever and cranky old women. This book contains so many great scenes between wry, mysterious, imperfect people who’ve lived real-feeling lives inside and around the edges of horrible bureaucracies. Child-mother-grandmother. An amazing assemblage here. I thought often of time, my own and that of others.

[Fiona W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell yeah bring back books where every paragraph is necessary and insightful

[Cammi · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much about the reflection of aging and what makes a Life a Life and how to have one

[Casey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was just not for me. I think I needed to read it with a Lit professor to help me with the symbolism.

[Diane Desmond · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a good story in there somewhere. It was overwritten, too many details with no point, and unbelievably tedious.

[Lynne Bundy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was really hard to feel any sense of engagement with the lives of these characters because they didn’t seem engaged with their own lives.

[Susan Fichandler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I should go back to the stars ?? I didn’t like this book because I felt too detached from the characters and their lives .

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 rounded down

first and foremost, I want to thank macmillan audio for the giveaway copy of the audiobook!

I was so excited for this, but I'm sad to say it took until 80% into the book for this to start to go as deep as I wanted it to. I didn't feel like there was really any foundation set as to why Suzanna feels she has to keep going up the hill to visit, especially when there's a time she could've went but didn't and really didn't feel anything about that decision at all. it was also hard for me to get a sense of any of the characters own individual selves because the writing never gives them their own voice, they all just suffer under Clark's ~*~quirky~*~ writing. overall, im just disappointed.

content warnings: incarcerated parent, dementia, death

[Wendi Flint Rank (WendiReviews) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The WOW factor is high here! No matter your life experiences,
this debut novel will keep this book glued to your heart and
hands to the last word. It's the book that has you questioning
your entire life and the choices you've made, while arranging
and rearranging your feelings, repeatedly.
This is the book that transcends genre and will grab everyone.
My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the softcopy used
for review purposes.

[Laura Winnick · Rating 4 out of 5]

last 1/3 > first 2/3

[Heather Sharp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Made it to page 167 then realized I was going to stay bored with it. So I stopped.