For many of us, we take for granted that we know where we’re from, who our close family is and where our familial ties are that keep us grounded; a place to look back to see how far we’ve come and where to go back when we find our sense of self getting adrift in the complexity of life — so when a part of that history is missing, what happens? Our extraordinary September Book of the Month is Kevin Wilson’s Run For The Hills, a heart-warming, heart-aching and heartbreaking novel, that takes us on a journey through 4 half siblings, each abandoned by the same father as he steadily moved from East to West across the United States.
After her father left unexpectedly overnight from her family farm in Coalfield, Tennessee, Mad is weary yet somewhat content with running the farm with her mother, stung by her father’s sudden disappearance years ago but steadfastly maintaining a very successful organic business. One market day, she is approached by a man in a PT Cruiser, a bizarre car which is ‘the absurd mixture of too-far-in-the-past and too-far-in-the-future’, who reveals he is her previously unknown half-brother, Rube. After Rube’s revelation that he has discovered their father had at least two other families after himself and Mad, he announces he is on a road trip to track down their father for answers. From Massachusetts, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Utah and further West, the half-siblings find themselves on this bizarre, intense, optimistic and daring road-trip, with a growing family they never imagined they had.
Along the journey, they share experiences and emotions that they realise they couldn’t have for anyone else except for family. The pride of seeing their sister they just met skilfully playing at an NCAA basketball game, the heart they feel towards their brother’s determinedly optimistic attitude despite the odds, the arguments, surprises, and the hurdles and the trials they experience along the way. The love they discover for each other, tied together through their shared abandonment from their father and the hope and terror they feel at the prospect of finding him again, seeps through the pages and into our hands as we share their aches, traumas, laughs, tears and stories.
This novel shows that family moves between and beyond blood relation – it is something we are given, something we find, and something to simply have in this strange world. Whatever family looks like for each of us, we feel that invisible strong connection of pride when they succeed, comfort when they fail, forgiveness when they castigate. The siblings discover this new familial feeling together, forged in a strange and unique understanding that only your own family can know, even if you haven’t known your family long.
Written in Wilson’s trademark wit and dry humour, the heart in this novel is sincere, nonsensical, poignant and incredibly emotional in the most deadpan way. A driving quest that we can all understand, it is the most human want of all to know where you’re from and where you belong. A huge ten out of ten from me — this is the raucous road trip you are going to want to join this September.
Run For The Hills is published by Text Publishing
9781923058347 | PB | £11.99 | Out 25th September 2025
