The Hill — Harriet Clark

An electrifying debut about crime and punishment and coming of age inside someone else’s fate.Suzanna Klein spends every Saturday at Hillcrest prison, where her mother is serving a life sentence. Many leave Hillcrest and do not return—women who are released or transferred, family members who stop visiting. Suzanna’s grandmother has never visited and is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s decision to aid in a politically motivated robbery that led to a man’s death. At an early age Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever—to stay by choice, not by curse—and the book traces her quest to remain in a place everyone else wants to leave. Encircled around Suzanna as she grows are a cohort of her grandmother’s friends who know one another from their days in the Communist Party. As Suzanna approaches adulthood, she goes from preparing cocktails for these lively women, to caring for them as they age. Falling deeper into their lives and memories, losses and regrets, Suzanna finds herself torn between leaving and staying, abandonment and loyalty, a future elsewhere and a future spent walking up one hill forever.A wry and unexpected take on the myth of Sisyphus, The Hill is a masterfully told story of three generations of women whose lives have been shaped by punishment. Clark’s prose is elegant and haunting as she seamlessly weaves questions of justice, duty, and fate into her telling of Suzanna’s young life. The Hill is a singular exploration of a shared truth: that family can be its own life sentence.