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3 books match the query 'Hill, Kathleen'
Like Wine Through Water
A NovelKathleen Hill
Northwestern University Press, 2027
A pivotal summer in the life of Maria Branwell, the mother of the Brontë sisters
In imagined diary entries from the summer of 1812, twenty-nine-year-old Maria Branwell is pondering a momentous choice. Far from her Cornish home, working with her aunt and uncle at their Methodist boys’ school on the moors of Yorkshire, she has just been introduced to the Irish clergyman Patrick Brontë. The two are powerfully drawn to one another, resulting in a proposal Maria accepts wholeheartedly—yet reservations begin to surface. From her earliest years she has felt marked by an uncommon destiny, one she had assumed incompatible with an ordinary life of marriage and children. Does marriage fit into that destiny? Or is there a different path to take? The choice of this woman forgotten by history will alter the course of literature forever.
Still Waters in Niger
Kathleen Hill
Northwestern University Press, 2001
A New York Times Notable Book for 1999
Best Fiction of 1999, the Los Angeles Times Book Review
Starred review, Publishers Weekly
Finalist for 1998 Dublin IMPAC Literary Award
The narrator of this book is an Irish-American woman who returns to the West African country of Niger where she had lived seventeen years earlier as the wife of an academic and the mother of three young daughters. Now she is visiting her eldest daughter, Zara, who has herself returned to Africa during a season of devastating drought and is working in a village clinic that cares for women and children suffering from starvation.
Still Waters in Niger is a beautifully observed account of a return to a place at once exotic and familiar, as well as a tale of inner discovery. As the narrator reacquaints herself with her daughter and with the Africa of her past, she meets other mothers and their children. With her own memories of young motherhood strong, she becomes aware of the strikingly similar ways in which the impassioned and often difficult bonds between mothers and daughters are revealed across the divide of cultures. Hill paints a compelling portrait of a community of women grounded in kinship and care for their children, a society characterized not only by pain and exhaustion but by humor, delicacy, and strength. Filled with vivid, elegant descriptions and meditations on hunger, poverty, the desert, women, memory, and the love between mothers and daughters, Still Waters in Niger is the haunting story of a woman looking simultaneously backward and forward.
Who Occupies This House
A NovelKathleen Hill
Northwestern University Press, 2011
The narrator’s project, inspired at the outset by silences that extend backward to the untold story of the Famine, turns into a vast exploration of loss, inheritance, and the nature of memory. In a voice both stark and lyrical, the narrator calls up transformative, often tragic, moments in lives that have shaped her own. Remembering a past she never knew, she hopes to release from its sway the vanishing present.
Who Occupies This House is a strikingly beautiful account of the difficult reckoning with one’s family legacy that every adult faces. Punctuated by photographs and images that bring the narrative into sharp focus, it will draw comparisons to such divergent writers as W.G. Sebald and Kate O’Brien.