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
A debut reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
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
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
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
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
One of the most beautiful books I have ever read
A profound, funny, and utterly original excavation of a young girl’s consciousness
This book is a joy to read: the writing itself is wonderful but the conception is magical
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?
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 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
A debut reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
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
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
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
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
One of the most beautiful books I have ever read
A profound, funny, and utterly original excavation of a young girl’s consciousness
This book is a joy to read: the writing itself is wonderful but the conception is magical
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?
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 *

Harriet Clark is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for her short story ‘Descent’, and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Wallace Stegner Program. The Hill is her debut novel.

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