Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book.
Although this book is really well written, I have to say that I really didn't enjoy it very much. When I think of what the world has since the beginning of this pandemic, it saddened me.
This story shows what it is like when people are isolated for long periods of time. These people lived in a village where you could go and walk and really not be a threat to anyone, and yet they were locked down. They were to remain in their homes or be heavy fined. Not talk to their neighbours, or go for a walk on the fell, or check in with a woman who was alone, had lost her husband and just recently had beaten cancer.
People need other people. It is human nature. Governments wanted neighbours to rat others out, if they wern't following the rules.
I think the only mistake this woman made,xwas not leaving a note for her son, saying where she had gone.
We all go stir crazy when we're locked up for days. She was well equipped when she went off to the fell. Was she being selfish, maybe. Or was she just trying to cope. I had really mixed feelings. about this book. At the end I found hope, so that is something.

This book was certainly relatable. And I've had major concentration issues during the pandemic. But this pulled me in, maybe because it was so timely. It was suspenseful, yet it oddly pulled me out of my own pandemic crisis reading about a protagonist dealing with the same worries, fears, and questions about her future. A very good read.

This is the first novel I have read centred around the Covid pandemic and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, having avoided the subject matter as much as I could in fiction. Like Ghost Wall before it, Sarah Moss has carved out a place of isolation and wilderness interrupted by modern rituals, Her characters are deep and reflective although her language is spare and without uneccessary prose. I really liked it.

I don’t know how wise it is to write while gob-smacked by a book, but I’m doing it anyway. Sarah Moss. The Fell. My first pandemic lockdown novel. I’m not sure I liked it as much as I did because it’s great, or because I think we’re starved to have some articulated understanding of what we’ve experienced. (I think only time will tell, so I’ll have to revisit The Fell when my year-end review comes ’round.) Or maybe I was engrossed and in awe of Moss’s novel? novella? (it’s really quite short) because I’m skittish around litfic, with its dreaded poshy reviewers’ “lyrical” epithet (tells me to stay far, far away). I adore narratives of ideas, meaty with meaning and demanding thought over feeling; hence, not a fan of lyrical…please, no description. No wonder I enjoyed Moss as much as I did and no wonder I’m ordering her entire backlist because now, I have to read all the Mosses.

So. The Fell. Lockdown 2020 in England’s Peak District, the “fell” is backdrop to the characters’ lives, at least until one of them enters it and another must follow her. Rob, whom we meet in the first chapter, a divorced dad with an angry, snarky daughter upset when he leaves on a call. Is he a doctor? Moss doesn’t tell, not yet. Sixteen-year-old Matt who lives with single mother Kate, in precarious financial circumstances; their neighbour, Alice, a comfortably-off widow who has cancer. Sounds mundane and it is mundane: the circumstances of the characters’ lives. They’re in lockdown: Alice hasn’t left her house in weeks; Matt and Kate help out with groceries and meds, but now Kate has to isolate because she came into contact with someone with covid. Kate can’t stand being “locked up”, even for the requisite weeks; she suffers and, stupidly maybe? sets off at dusk to walk the fell…it’s empty anyway, she won’t come into contact with anyone. Alice sees her leaving. Kate tumbles and is badly injured. Night approaches and her position, at best, precarious; at worst, fatal. That’s it, them’s the “happenings”. What compells and drives the narrative (and I was so anxious reading it, hold-my-breath anxious) are the characters’ inner worlds.

Which are also mundane, yet rich and gripping. These characters come alive and I cared about them. I didn’t always understand them, Kate not at all, but I cared. That’s not an easy feat, not when much contemporary fiction is distancing (no pun intended), so rich in irony and remoteness. But maybe that’s what the lock-downs have wrought: the end of that remoteness, maybe we’ve had enough of that, thank you very much.

As for those “inner worlds”, they’re prosaic and compelling. Alice, pondering her isolation, not liking it, but not hating it, thinking about her family, what she likes (cookies and her electric blanket, a cheerful Mrs. Dalloway is our Alice), how she misses going down to the shops. Matt, typical bored teen, but not sullen, a good boy; stuck at home, he does his share. Kate, desperate and needy to be out in nature (hr garden isn’t enough, too tame, I suppose), suffocated by the lock-down (I didn’t get Kate at all; I enjoyed the lock-down, except for the terror-of-dying part, and we were not merely allowed, but encouraged, to take walks); she’s barely responsible, worked as a waitress, furloughed now, financially strapped. She takes off and falls. When she doesn’t return: Alice is worried about Matt, Matt is worried out of his mind for his mother; Alice worries about Kate “out there”. And Kate is so hurt, she hallucinates a conversation with a Raven (he quoth “never more”, quite). Rob, with his sullen almost-teen back home…is one of the search and rescue team who look for Alice through the night.

Moss doesn’t make style paramount (how refreshing) and infuses her narrative with urgent prose, her characters’ inner worlds, petty, prosaic, or profound, musings come fast and furious in words that tumble and jumble like water over rocks. Their words are necessary to them, however, and with deceptive skill, are not contrived to be “profound”. Yet Moss’s contrivance is just that, a contrivance that engulfs we’re unaware of being taken by the tide. It was interesting how difficult it was to find a passage to highlight and quote, an exercise born of my now-out-of-date “new” criticism” training (what can I say, I’m old). It didn’t work here. I had to take in the whole and think about it: there weren’t any neat meaning-infused passages of heightened language. Maybe one and not particularly “meaning-infused”, not really; it’s a fulcrum to the narrative: a marker to someone present and then, absent; to something that happened before and is now over. Kate was here and now, she’s not:

The raven flies down the valley. It’s hours yet, till sunrise. Sheep rest where their seed, breed and generation have worn hollows in the peat, lay their dreaming heads where past sheep have lain theirs. The lovely hares sleep where the long grass folds over them. No burrows, no burial. The Saukin Stone dries in the wind. Though the stone’s feet are planted deep in the rivulets, in the bodies of trees a thousand years dead, its face takes the weather, gazes eyeless over heather and bog. Roots reach deep, bide their time. Spring will come.

That stone, not Ozymandias, man-made and despairing, but cyclical time, “seed, breed and generation,” an abiding indifference, not malevolent (Moss isn’t Hardy, thank goodness), simply a place devoid of human consciousness. (It’s the novel’s sole quiet moment, when the human noises/voices stop.) In nature, Moss identifies the promise of spring and inevitability of death: she leaves her characters, one by one, with an echo of the same; for some, the promise of spring; others, an ending. As her final line says, “Life, then, to be lived, somehow.”

A review e-copy was provided by the publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Fell was published on March 1st and may be readily found at your preferred vendor.

Pandemic fiction, set in the Peak DIstrict. Moss's latest is a compassionate and suspenseful novel about a woman, her son, her neighbour and her rescuer. Kate goes missing after deciding to go for a walk, in spite of corona regulations. Through the protagonists's thoughts, Moss captures the intolerance and isolation after the first lockdown really well.

A timely document!

Thank you Netgally and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC

In Sarah Moss's new novel, The Fell, the pandemic has strained Kate's precarious finances to the breaking point. She and her teenage son are home quarantining when she impulsively breaks the quarantine to go hiking alone one evening on the fell without telling anyone.

Moss always writes well and this book is no exception. It was, however, a little heavy-handed, which surprised me as Moss has always been nuanced in how she writes about charged issues. This novel was still enjoyable, with some lovely characters and the sense of people doing their best to do the right thing, but it's not a book I'll return to.

Brief and a little passé, Moss’s latest nevertheless offers an immersive slice of pandemic life, quartered between four characters variously involved as Kate goes missing on the moors. This author’s ability to evoke the quiet, often damp corners of middle England is striking and comes into its own in this glimpse of the Peak District, both dully treacherous and full of wild charm. Notable.

Amidst the November 2020 lockdown in England, A woman decides to break the quarantine law.

Kate, a recently furloughed waitress, who has also been exposed to Covid-19, anxious and restless, breaks quarantine laws for a breath of fresh air in the moors. Kate isn't in the best place mentally or financially when she decided to break the law, but quarantine has taken a toll on her. She warms up, takes her hiking kit and heads for the hills, leaving her teenaged son, Matt, behind. But what starts as an anxious woman's attempt to vent her anxiety, ends up as a mountain rescue operation in severely worsening weather conditions.

The story captures the essence of life during lockdown, pitting the two sides of arguments against one another: lockdown for the common good and the detriments of the lockdowns rules to certain individual lives. Moss elegantly and deftly puts a lot of effort into wording the consciousness of her characters as each suffers from a different set of challenges during the pandemic. Kate, questioning all her life choices up until her decision to break quarantine; Matt, Kate's son, who remains isolated at home alone, not knowing what happened to his mother, trying not to imagine how life without her would be like; Alice, Kate's neighbour, retired and alone and the last person to see her head out of the door; Rob, the rescue team volunteer, who may or may not have a hero complex, but who's only hope for now is to find Kate alive.

The tone of the story is reflective but the plot arc wasn't much developed. It was mainly the stream of consciousness of all the characters primarily showing where they come from mentally and socially alongside a hefty dose of social commentary. Towards the end, I found the story severed. It gave me the feeling that it was cut down in a rush.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.

I was given an ARC of The Fell in exchange for an honest review.
I felt a surge of ‘nostalgia’ whilst reading this book - a depiction of everyday village life depicted in all its 2020 lockdown restrictive glory. The characters are credible and believable in their frustration, boredom, and daring to break ‘the rules’. Boxed in for days on end in self-isolation with her teenage son, a furloughed single mum takes her chances in venturing out for a quick stroll on the fell which soon courts disaster and unseen consequences.

"Though the stone's feet are planted deep in the rivulets, in the bodies of trees a thousand years dead, its face takes the weather, gazes eyeless over heather and bog. Roots reach deep, bide their time. Spring will come."

3.5 ✨

The Fell by Sarah Moss is a short book narrating the story of Kate, who is supposed to be self-isolating at home with her son during the pandemic lockdown after being exposed to covid, but decides to go on a walk that turns into a mountain rescue operation after she falls and gets injured.

This story is told through four narrators: Kate, her son Matt, her neighbor Alice, and the mountain rescue volunteer Rob. The multiple perspectives on how the pandemic has impacted this diverse group of people was one of my favorite aspects of this book.

The Fell is one of those books that nothing really happens but a lot is said through something that appears as mundane and normal. Even though the story is compelling and the characters are intriguing, I found myself struggling to finish this as I'm not usually a fan of writing with no distinct dialogue. However, I absolutely adored the way that Sarah Moss writes about nature and will plan to read more of her previous works.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Kate is self-isolating during the Covid 19 pandemic with her son Matt, but on a dreary November evening her neighbour witnessess her breaking lockdown to walk on the fell. When she doesn't return for dinner, it's clear that something has gone wrong. Hours later, Rob and the rest of his mountain rescue team are out searching the fell for Kate.

Told from four perpectives we get a snapshot of what life was like in England during the pandemic. Shopping for neighbours, dinner dates over video calls and not wearing shoes for days. Moss details the effects of lockdown on Kate's mental health. Her stream of consciousness writing style is superb. As a reader you get right into the character's heads, witness first hand their claustrophobic environments, their declining mental health and their anxieties.

Moss's writing is witty, emotive and so easy to sink into. The Fell is a joy - a time capsule of the pandemic and a celebration of everyday ordinariness.

I spent ages on a review - I was then logged out and it disappeared! I’m not re-writing it but loved it: 5*

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 1, 2022

At its heart, The Fell is a meditation on the effects of social isolation. Those effects have been exacerbated for some during the pandemic, but loneliness can strike even when isolation is not encouraged by health policies. The story morphs into a wilderness rescue, but the plight of the victim creates little tension. The primary focus is on the thoughts of the central characters: an injured woman, her young son, their neighbor, and a member of the search-and-rescue team.

Anxiety pervades the characters in The Fell. They live in or near the mountains and moors on the outskirts of Greater Manchester in the County of Derbyshire. They are enduring pandemic quarantine rules that trap them in their homes. People are allowed outside only for essential purposes. The police use drones to record and shame people who engage in recreational walking. The central character views the quarantine in the broader context of history, a reminder that “the authorities have never liked to have commoners walking the land instead of getting and selling.”

When life in quarantine becomes too much for Kate, she takes a walk in the fells. (I had to look this up, but “fell walking” in Northern England refers to walking in hills and high land.) Whether the walk is illegal (Kate seems to think so) or only strongly discouraged by government policy (as another part of the book seems to suggest), Kate and her son both believe she should have stayed inside. That becomes obvious to the reader when, quarantine notwithstanding, Kate falls in the failing light and breaks her leg.

Kate is Matt’s mum. He’s alone in house, worried at his mother’s absence. Matt is afraid his mum will be arrested for breaking quarantine. He knows he’s not allowed outside during the quarantine but he visits their neighbor Alice, who won’t let him in but calls the mountain rescue service. All the officials who talk to Matt stay outside or speak to him via telephone with a masked number, which seems improbably cruel given that the kid is home alone with no support system.

Like Kate, Alice spends her quarantine fretting. She thinks about death and cancer and worries about her children. She thinks about Mark, with whom she shared 45 years of life. Alice is the most opinionated character, although the characters all share attitudes of gloom. “Social distancing,” Alice thinks, “whoever came up with that, there’s not much that’s less social than acting as if everyone’s unclean and dangerous, though the problem of course is that they are, or at least some of them and there’s no way of knowing.” She also complains that the pandemic has infected language by turning “distance” into a verb.

Alice thinks rude thoughts about doctors who blame patients for socializing and acquiring COVID. Aren’t patients always putting themselves at risk (she asks herself) by deciding to drive or play sports or sleep with the wrong person or carry a big pile of laundry up the stairs? “Alice thinks, let us give thanks for our pure blind luck as well as our warm beds and safe houses, though the problem with giving thanks for your own luck is that you’re also giving thanks that the misfortune landed on someone else.”

Rob is a first responder. He rescues people who have gone missing on the mountain. Rob’s daughter Ellie is with him for the weekend. She isn’t happy when his job requires him to leave her to search for Kate. Rob, on the other hand, enjoys doing some good by volunteering for the mountain rescue team. He decided to be self-employed so he wouldn’t have to put up with employers who gripe that volunteers refuse to work overtime so they can be available for rescues when needed.

The Fell is a character-driven novel that is undisturbed by a plot. Kate’s disappearance is simply an excuse for the reader to tune into the characters’ internal monologues. After her fall, Kate’s mind wanders as she tries to summon the strength to crawl through the heath. Perhaps she is entering a state of delirium as she converses with a raven. Some of her thoughts turn out to be lyrics from Celtic folk music (I had to google odd-sounding sentences to discover that). It is a reasonable place for Kate’s mind to go, given that she dabbled with folk singing before she met Paul, her ex-husband, a meeting about which she is now ambivalent, as she is about much of her life.

There is something to be said for a novel that recognizes both the public health necessity of a quarantine during a pandemic and the emotional necessity of escaping confinement that is imposed by outside forces. The characters whine about their circumstances a bit too much, but doesn’t everyone? They at least do so in amusingly droll prose. While The Fell might not appeal to readers who require a more substantive plot than “woman goes missing and people worry about her,” this short novel is worth reading for Sarah Moss’ observational take on the depressing nature of life in the midst of a pandemic.

RECOMMENDED

This was a somewhat interesting book, but doesn’t touch the imagery and suspense of some of her previous works.

Heads up: injury involving broken bones, but never gets too gruesome, thankfully

The story follow a woman named Kate who goes a bit too stir-crazy after being in a Covid 19 quarantine for 10. She sets out on a hike, unprepared, leaving her teenage son at home. Once he realizes she’s been gone too long, he calls the police and with the help of neighbors, a search and rescue squad, and a random bird, they do all they can to find Kate.

What I did enjoy most about this book was the cast of characters, knowingly and unknowingly working together, even though they are each by themselves. Each chapter rotates the point of view, which really fleshes out the story.

Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have expected another creepfest masterpiece like Ghost Wall. This is still a thoughtful story about isolation and strength.

‘It’s when he comes downstairs that he realises he’s the only one in the house.’

One evening in November 2020, in the middle of a quarantine period, Kate leaves home:

‘She won’t be long, really she won’t, only a sip of outside, fast up the lane and over the fields, just a little way up the stone path for a quick greeting to the fells.’

She is stressed by confinement in her house with her teenaged son Matt, oppressed by the present, concerned about the past and worried for the future. A quick walk on the fells will settle her.

Their elderly neighbour Alice saw Kate leave. Alice has health issues of her own and is isolating for protection. When Matt realises that Kate is not home or in the garden, he doesn’t know what to do. He prepares a meal, and while he avoids contacting the authorities for a time, his need to have his mother found outweighs his concern that she has broken the law by leaving quarantine, and will be liable for a huge fine.

Kate, who left without her mobile phone, has a fall. Injured, she cannot return home.

Rob, part of the local search and rescue team, is called out. His daughter is annoyed: this is her weekend with Rob, and she believes he is more committed to the rescue team than to her. Rob explains that the team is short-handed because of illness, and leaves.

This short novel (fewer than 200 pages) unfolds through the viewpoints of these four people. Alice supports Matt as well as she can, Matt worries about his mother, Kate is torn between survival and surrender while Rob is concerned that they find Kate before it is too late.

I read this novel in one sitting: I could not put it down. The concern, the focus is on finding Kate. It is clear, from those parts of the story from Kate’s point of view, that she is vulnerable. Alice, Matt, and Rob each put aside their own concerns, aspects of their own lives when Kate is missing. And I finished the novel wondering what might happen next.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Sarah Moss is one of my favorite contemporary writers and this book does not disappoint. If anything, it’s a bit too real and close to the bone and I honestly think I might enjoy it more in a few years when our current times are in the rear view mirror. It felt like reading a horror book, to be honest and I was on edge the whole time. Thankfully, this is a small book and I finished it in one sitting. The writing and insights are so real it is actually scary and it transported me back to March 2020 more than I really wanted. The four characters we meet are also very real people with real lives that are compounded by the pandemic. No one is perfect and nothing is wrapped up tidily at the end. We do get some hope, but we’re left wondering and Matt, Kate, Alice and Joe all have stayed with me. I worry about them still! This is a dark read but if you’d like your own covid experience to be validated you’ll probably find it in here. Excellent novel that continues the author’s wonderful career. Thanks for the advance copy.

The blurb for this book sums it up perfectly. This is a story of Kate, who is on a 2 week quarantine during the pandemic and is feeling cooped up in her home with her son. There is no serious tension between she and her son, but rather an internal tension because Kate loves to be outside and is now confined to the inside. Other characters are representative of this small UK community, where the national park is the main draw for outsiders and Kate is known for long hikes up the hill prior to lockdown.
One afternoon, several days into quarantine, Kate starts off for a hike up into the fell when she runs into some trouble. Her mind has told her to just go and keep going. She breaks all the rules, both of lockdown and quarantine, to her personal rules of how to be prepared for anything when venturing out. Then she has a fall and is in trouble. As darkness sets in, we hear the perspective of Kate, her son, the next door neighbor, and one of the rescue team members.
I appreciated the storyline, that relates both the seriousness of the pandemic to the weight of being isolated and how that affects people differently. This book does a terrific job going between varying opinions as to what level of care and concern is appropriate and reasonable and what has negative effects.
What I didn't care for was the stream of consciousness style of writing. This seemed in place to mirror how these characters would be feeling and thinking to themselves about the events as they happen, but I found this style to be difficult to read. I would lose the plot partly through a long sentence and need to start the sentence over to regain it.
I have mixed feelings about this. I think overall it needs the right reader and it probably isn't for everyone. Therefore, I will recommend it to some but not everyone.
#TheFell #Netgalley #FSG

An intense, fiercely original, and perhaps too-timely novel, Sarah Moss's THE FELL is a richly distilled and haunting read, a piercing examination of the responsibilities we owe others--and ourselves. Many thanks to FSG and Netgalley for the opportunity for an early read.

The Fell is another brilliant, claustrophobic and unsettling novel from Sarah Moss. Kate goes out for a walk on familiar hills in the middle of lockdown and things take a turn for the worse. Moss is telling the reader not to relax. Not everyone is going to be okay at the end of the story. This is not that kind of book. It's about a sad time full of kindnesses and tragedy and you won't forget it in a hurry.

THE FELL by Sarah Moss initially sparked my interest because of its promise if a short, intense, and interior narrative of a woman's dangerous experience in an already dangerous world. While this novel delivered in some aspects, I was ultimately underwhelmed overall. Although the book's blurb sums it up nicely, the novel lacks the kind of fast-paced and deeply intense narration I expected from a novel of this kind. Rather, the characters were a bit difficult to truly engage with, and there were times when the writing was confusing, particularly when the novel moved between perspectives. Perhaps what also contributed to my resistance to this novel was the focus on the pandemic and the way it effects all the characters in this novel. It might have been too literal, too close to home, and too familiar to be entertaining. All in all, I was disappointed by this, and surprisingly so, since every aspect of this book's promotion (cover, author, summary, etc) pointed to my liking it. I would definitely be open to reading other books by this author in the future, I think the plot of this one just wasn't for me.