Good Women

In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. 

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.

Praise for Good Women

“In Good Women, Halle Hill gifts us an unflinching peek at women who are trying, women who are aching, women who are running their hands along the walls of their dark hearts, fumbling for the light. Important and beautifully written, this collection is alive with bite and verve tick-tick-ticking on every page.” —Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Whiskey & Ribbons

“Halle Hill misses nothing, sees everything—Good Women gives witness. These stories are intimate, unbound and Hill delivers them like a wrestled testimony barreling through time. Halle Hill is here, y’all. And Good Women, these stories, these lives, will last and last in all of us.” —Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, author of Sleepovers

“Halle Hill is a major artist, one of the most astounding I know of living today. Good Women, her first collection of stories, sits dominant on the shelf next to the other classic story collections I admire. She’s written a future classic. You’ll see what I mean once you crack it open.” —Bud Smith, author of Teenager