The Hill

Suzanna Klein is a baby when her mother sets out at dawn with a band of fellow radicals to hold up a bank. The mother is sentenced to life in a prison on a hill. Suzanna vows to keep returning there for the rest of her life.

Every Saturday she waits at the prison gates with the other visiting children, who are all dressed as if for a celebration. Inside are a nursery and a cemetery, watchful guards and distractable nuns. Some of the women count the days to their release, while Suzanna's mother will never leave.

At home, her grandmother raises her. She cannot forgive her daughter's crime and will not set foot in the prison. Around them gather the grandmother's old friends from the Communist Party, who spend long cocktail hours arguing over the Hitler-Stalin pact. They once insisted on changing the world, and now they are split between teaching Suzanna how it works and keeping it from her.

The novel is funny as well as moving, and it follows a child growing up between two worlds across three generations marked by punishment. Suzanna wants to stay tied to the hill, but her mother wants her to be free.