In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023 in Fiction • One of Oprah Daily's Best Books of the Year One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of 2023 • Featured in People Magazine's Best Books of Fall • One of the Boston Globe's 20 Books We’re Excited to Read This Fall • One of Kirkus's 20 Best Books To Read in September • Poets & Writer's "Page One" New and Noteworthy • One of the Southwest Review's 10 Must Read Books of 2023 • Finalist for the 2024 Weatherford Award in Fiction • Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist
"A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“A fantastic firecracker of a collection I'll return to again and again!” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living.
Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries—or lack thereof—influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude.
With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing. Vibrant and exacting, Hill is a must-read new voice in literary fiction.
