Sins of the mother: The Hill, by Harriet Clark, reviewed
From our UK edition
For a novel rooted in reality, there is an eerily mythical feel to the first few pages of The Hill, Harriet Clark’s absorbing debut about a young girl growing up with a mother in prison. ‘That great gatherings of women had been brought to live on the hill I took as the natural order. That women defected from this order was part of the order, and that we would never defect was also part of the order,’ writes Suzanna, the first-person protagonist, who is eight when the story opens. She is trying to make sense of a world that is both deeply abnormal and the only reality she has ever known. The women’s prison has a name, Hillcrest, but is generally known as ‘the hill’; the lowercase makes it feel almost figurative, despite being a physical location.
