The Fell

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Pub Date 25 Jul 2019 | Archive Date 16 May 2019

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Description

In an unspecified time and location, an unnamed boy is living what he feels to be an idyllic life in the faded and peeling Lido where his father is a lifeguard. He idolises his father – never more so than when he saves the life of a suicidal man – and he comes to believe that heroism is all.

The arrest of his sister Lilly later that summer brings the halcyon days to an abrupt end, and his family is torn apart, with Lilly sent to jail and the boy set to a boarding house for dysfunctional boys, far away from his home – The Fell. The boys in the home become his family and they band together against their enemies, both real and imagined, they become family. 

The boy sees the world and his place in it through a unique lens. He meets ghosts, hears voices and battles his fears. What he never does, however, is question his own version of reality.

When the boy's fear and hatred of authority come to a head, everything is thrown into disarray and his action lead him to run from the Fell. And run, and run . .  .

In an unspecified time and location, an unnamed boy is living what he feels to be an idyllic life in the faded and peeling Lido where his father is a lifeguard. He idolises his father – never more so...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781910453742
PRICE $16.95 (USD)

Average rating from 10 members


Featured Reviews

The Fell is a challenging, flawed but grimly compelling book. Told almost as a stream of consciousness, with a lack of clarity offered about the context in which the story takes place, using language that at times is basic, at times inventive, and blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. The unreliable narrator is both brutal and brutalised, masking a tender yearning for love and a lost family.

I can’t say I enjoyed reading this, but it’s certainly an interesting novel. It won’t be for all, and I suspect in my late teens / early twenties I’d have fallen for it harder than I did now.

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I hope this book finds its audience. It's such an oddball mix of elements, perhaps Ulysses meets Lord of the Flies. At base, it is commentary on the world as seen by an unnamed boy of an indeterminate age in an unspecified time and place.

British spellings on some words and the author's nationality are the only hints offered for those readers who positively must know what it is they are reading.

"The Fell" is Feallan House, a residential school for boys with troubled backgrounds. In our boy's case, his colorful family had suddenly fallen apart and he was whisked by social services to this isolated outpost where the inmates do indeed seem to be running the asylum.

But don't expect linear narration. There are intense bondings with the people who cross his path, most of them other boys; there is virtuosic wordplay; there are some paragraphs -- filled with verbal trickery -- that run for several screens on my Kindle; but at least these latter do contain punctuation. (Speaking of punctuation, the author points out that it has nothing to do with being on time.)

The Fell came to me as an advance reader's copy through NetGalley and Red Door Publishing. It's like no other ARC I've read so far. I recommend that you read this book, and I urge you to open your mind up as wide as possible -- or, maybe if you're a very destination-oriented reader, give it a pass. But know that you'll be missing out.

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