Run for the Hills
A Novel
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4.0 • 59 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A touching and generous romp of a novel . . . Wilson makes a bold and convincing case that every real family is one you have to find and, at some point, choose, even if it’s the one you’re born into.” — New York Times Book Review
An unexpected 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 been just Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While it’s a bit lonely, she sometimes admits, and a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it’s mostly okay. Mostly.
Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.
As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with every new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?
Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.
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.
