The Hill

Clark blends vivid Kafkaesque motifs with a whimsical coming-of-age narrative in her beautiful debut. Suzanna, the narrator, was raised by her grandparents in New York City. Now a young woman, she recounts how she spent her early childhood regularly visiting a hilltop prison outside the city where her mother was serving a life sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the killing of a guard. The mother, a former revolutionary, is a cause célèbre, but as a child Suzanna doesn’t understand the details. Her grandfather, with whom she visits the prison, describes the crime as a “misguided attempt... to steal from the rich and give to the poor.” He dies when Suzanna is nine, and her unyielding grandmother, disgusted by and ashamed of her daughter, refuses to take Suzanna to the prison or read her daughter’s letters, even as her own health deteriorates. A sympathetic nun from the prison arranges for Suzanna’s regular visits, and as she grows up, she begins to question what she wants for herself. Vexed by her push-pull relationship with her mother, she wonders if she’s continued visiting the prison only at the nun’s insistence, and sense that her grandmother, who pushes her into skipping the seventh grade, is impatient for her to become the successful young woman she’d wanted her daughter to be (“Everywhere I turned in my seventeenth year someone was saying, Go”). It’s a tour de force. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)