"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Join us at Clio’s on May 14th for the Bay Area launch of Harriet Clark’s The Hill, and a conversation that explores how incarceration and immigration impact families and childhood while examining the role of art in reflecting and changing these realities.

After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop Pr*son, Suzanna Klein vows to visit her on the hill forever. She was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the Pr*son gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released.

At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the Pr*son. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother’s friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.

Harriet Clark’s The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction.

Harriet will be joined in conversation by Lauren Markham, fiction writer, essayist and journalist, whose work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, and the environment.

Harriet Clark is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2023 Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Wallace Stegner Program. The Hill is her debut novel.

Lauren Markham is a writer based in California covering social issues for outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, and Mother Jones. She is the award-winning author of Immemorial (2025), A Map of Future Ruins (2024) and The Far Away Brothers (2017).

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