Photo by Lynn Michelle Molyneux ©. All rights reserved 2026 / Bridgeman Images

A grandmother who dispenses dubious advice like boiled sweets; a hill that must be climbed, and climbed, and climbed again; a tower; a girl; a world in which darkness lurks just over the page – you could almost remix the ingredients of Harriet Clark’s stunning debut novel to make a fairy tale. Instead, The Hill is a crystalline story of growing up in the shade of the generations who came before.

Suzanna, who narrates the novel, lives with her grandparents in New York City. On the weekends, she travels with her grandfather to the hilltop prison where her mother, Helen, is an inmate, serving a life sentence for her role as the getaway driver in a bank robbery that led to the death of a security guard. When her grandfather dies, a kindly nun escorts her. Eventually, she takes herself there. Her grandmother, Sylvie, who is in many ways the softly beating heart of the novel, refuses to go: “You think I’m taking you to that prison?…