The debut everyone’s talking about – this week’s literary fiction: THE HILL by Harriet
THE HILL by Harriet Clark (Sceptre £16.99, 288pp)
This quietly intense, tightly focused debut, praised by such luminaries as Jeffrey Eugenides and Tara Westover, revolves around the twin poles of its young narrator’s world.
There is the Manhattan apartment where Suzanna’s grandmother, a former Communist Party member, is raising her granddaughter. And there is the prison where Suzanna’s mother is serving life for a bank robbery committed in the name of wealth redistribution.
For the years of her adolescence, Suzanna shuttles between the two, fiercely resistant to the script of inevitable change that the world and time would impose.
That every page feels authentic is no surprise: the author’s own mother, a member of radical group the Weather Underground, was imprisoned for decades.
It’s also animated by memorable characters and deadpan wit; a study of family ties that, in resisting literal journeys, enacts a profound metaphorical one.
HOPE HOUSE by Joe Bond (Fig Tree £16.99, 304pp)
Hope can sustain, and hope can crush, as the juvenile delinquent inmates – or rather, ‘peers’ – residing in the titular Kentucky institution at the heart of this novel-in-stories know all too well.
It’s the late 1980s and our narrator is 14-year-old AWOL, so-called because of his compulsive absconding. But there’s also Smoove, whose hitching gait isn’t a gang affiliation but the legacy of being shot in the feet; Freckles, no more than a child in spite of the charges against him; Tonyboy Mallopelli, who goes down in legend for eating a lightbulb; and holding them all together, Watts, Hope House’s impassioned, inspirational leader, who is barely older than the boys in his care.
Heartbreaking, redemptive and deeply empathic, this radiates Bond’s love for his characters, which the reader comes to share too.
DAMS by Irene Solà (Granta £14.99, 224pp)
Why make up stories? Perhaps, it’s suggested to twenty-something Ada, the character and would-be author at the centre of Dams, it’s because writers, like children, feel the world ceases to exist in the scenes they’re not part of.
Ada, in any case, is the first to admit that her tales are attempts to infill the gaps in the stories of her family and the Catalan community where she grew up. The result is a collection that ranges from resonant character studies and rural slices of life, right through to a zombie yarn.
At the same time, Ada’s own life (and love) story unfolds alongside her playful work, the warp of the former and the weft of latter making for a thoroughly beguiling whole.
Solà, who won the 2020 European Literature Prize, has produced a diverting, lightly metafictional delight.