Hannah Thurman’s Mercy Hill , is an emotionally nuanced coming-of-age story set within the confines of an aging mental institution in Raleigh, North Carolina, told from the point of view of the youngest of four gifted daughters of the hospital’s head psychiatrist, a woman who has championed the rights of those with mental problems since the death of her own mother by apparent suicide. Thurman, already honored with a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship and a 2023 Florida Review Editor’s Prize for Fiction, has a masterful command of her subject matter and the complexities of a family drama in her first novel. In her acknowledgments, she credits her mother, Rita Thurman, for “the initial inspiration to set a novel on a fictionalized Dix Hill (with a  very  different family from our own.)” What was the seed that evolved into this novel? I asked her. “My mother briefly worked as a speech therapist at Dorothea Dix hospital, the state-run psychiatric facility I grew up near in Raleigh,” she explained.…