Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Hermione Hoby on Harriet Clark’s The Hill , Avi Shlaim on Omer Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong , Parul Sehgal on Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life , Nicolás Medina Mora on Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender , Sophie Gilbert on Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.

“The premise sounds like a bad dream: Towering above your life stands a hill that you must keep ascending and descending forever. Or, to put the conceit of Harriet Clark’s breathtaking debut novel in more concrete terms: 8-year-old Suzanna pledges to visit, each week, the hilltop prison where her mother is serving a life sentence until that sentence is complete — to become a sort of secondary prisoner of her mother’s fate.…