The Hill, Harriet Clark
The Hill, Harriet Clark
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The Hill
A Novel

Author: Harriet Clark

Narrator: Maggie Thompson

Unabridged: 7 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/05/2026


Synopsis

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Harriet Clark

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Annie Tate on April 21, 2026

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 sto......more

Goodreads review by Wendi Flint Rank on March 15, 2026

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 b......more

Goodreads review by Tyler on April 06, 2026

I set this aside a couple of weeks ago (I loved the language, but was having trouble getting into it), and when I returned to it this weekend, I flew through it. I absolutely loved it. A quirky, tender coming-of-age story with an off-kilter blend of humor and heartache. Suzanna’s world is defined by......more

Goodreads review by Hannah on March 24, 2026

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 w......more

Goodreads review by Lauren on April 20, 2026

*I work at Monkey Wrench Books in Morgantown, WV, and we received an Advanced Readers Copy* I picked up this novel out of our advanced readers pile with 0 expectations, and It left me beside myself in its emotional depth, and a deep desire to sit with the author and discuss what it means to come home......more


Quotes

Advance Praise

“[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