Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Hermione Hoby on Harriet Clark’s  The Hill , Avi Shlaim on Omer Bartov’s  Israel: What Went Wrong , Parul Sehgal on Gisèle Pelicot’s  A Hymn to Life , Nicolás Medina Mora on Álvaro Enrigue’s  Now I Surrender , Sophie Gilbert on Caro Claire Burke’s  Yesteryear. “The premise sounds like a bad dream: Towering above your life stands a hill that you must keep ascending and descending forever. Or, to put the conceit of Harriet Clark’s breathtaking debut novel in more concrete terms: 8-year-old Suzanna pledges to visit, each week, the hilltop prison where her mother is serving a life sentence until that sentence is complete — to become a sort of secondary prisoner of her mother’s fate.  The Hill  might be dreamlike, but it’s far from nightmarish, instead charged with a hushed quality of distillation, lustrous with the obscure meaning of familial romance, plus the sense—common to dreams— of promising some final understanding…