Run for the Hills
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A road trip across America brings a family together, in this raucous and moving new novel from the bestselling author of Nothing to See Here.
Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mother on their Tennessee farm. It’s mostly okay. Maybe sometimes a bit lonely. Then one day a stranger pulls up in a rental car and informs Madeline that he’s her half brother, Reuben, abandoned by their dad thirty years ago. Reuben has hired a detective to track down their father, along with a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to join him on a cross-country road trip to find them all.
As Mad and Rube and eventually the others share stories of their father, they realise he behaved quite differently in all of his lives, and begin to question what he was looking for each time. What kind of man will they find? Who are they to one another? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm? Infused with deadpan wit and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a family saga like no other—a novel about a family forged in unlikely circumstances, united by hope in an unknown future.
Kevin Wilson is the author of the New York Times bestseller Nothing to See Here, as well as the novels The Family Fang, Perfect Little World, and Now Is Not the Time to Panic, and the short-story collections Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine. He lives with his family in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he is an associate professor in the English department at Sewanee: The University of the South.
‘A work of genius: surprising, funny, sad, and completely original…Wilson is a fantastic talent…We need novels like this urgently.’ Nick Hornby on Nothing to See Here
‘A big-hearted nerdy romance that evolves into a more ambivalent meditation on the power of art.’ Age on Now Is Not the Time to Panic
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A set of half-siblings meet each other for the first time in this pleasant if tepid road novel from Wilson (Now Is Not the Time to Panic). It's 2007 when Boston mystery author Rube Hill learns he has three younger half-siblings. He rents a car and drives south to look up his half-sister, Madeline "Mad" Hill, an organic farmer in Tennessee. As Rube explains to Mad, their father abandoned each of their families in turn before starting a new life. Rube convinces Mad to join him on a road trip to visit their other two half-siblings—Pepper "Pep" Hill, a college basketball sensation in Oklahoma, and Theron, who's still a young child, in Utah—before continuing to California in search of their father. As Rube drives across the country assembling the group, they compare memories of their father and the lingering hurt over his sudden disappearances. Though the tone verges on saccharine, Wilson's character work is top-notch, and he makes clear how the foursome struggle to connect in part because their father was a different man while raising each of them. This has less bite than Wilson's best work, but there's still plenty of heart.
