The fell : a novel / Sarah Moss.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"A slim, tense page-turner . . . I gulped The Fell down in one sitting."
--Emma Donoghue, author of The Pull of the Stars

From the award-winning author of Ghost Wall and Summerwater , Sarah Moss's The Fell is a riveting novel of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and the ever-nearness of disaster.

At dusk on a November evening, a woman slips through her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period, a true lockdown, but she can't take it anymore--the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know she's stepped out.

Kate planned only a quick walk--a stretch of the legs, a breath of fresh air--on paths she knows too well. But somehow she falls. Injured, unable to move, she sees that her short, furtive stroll will become a mountain rescue operation, maybe even a missing person case.

Sarah Moss's The Fell is a story of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and compassion. Suspenseful, witty, and wise, it asks probing questions about how close so many live to the edge and about who we are in the world, who we are to our neighbors, and who we become when the world demands we shut ourselves away.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Moss follows Summerwater with a revealing if tepid account of a family's frustrations and fears while under quarantine during the Covid-19 pandemic. Kate and her teenage son, Matt, are in the middle of a mandated two-week lockdown at their home in Derbyshire, England, after Kate's colleague tests positive. Restless, Kate breaks protocol and, without telling Matt, walks out of their house one evening, leaving her phone behind and trekking into the local mountain range for a brief escape. While there, she tumbles and badly injures herself. Unaware of Kate's whereabouts, Matt panics, and a neighbor, Alice, calls the police. Though the story takes place over the course of one night, Moss fleshes things out via the characters' memories and tangents, as Kate worries of government punishment and thinks back on her school days ("maybe they were right at school that breaking one rule makes it logical to break another until the commandments fall like dominos"), Matt waits to hear the worst, and Alice remembers her late husband. The interior monologues exhibit the author's talent at developing her characters, but in the end it all feels a bit inconsequential. For those already weary of the state of the world, this doesn't tread enough into new territory. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Mar.)

Booklist Review

Moss (Summerwater, 2021) presents a swift, nuanced tale about converging lives over the course of one evening during a pandemic lockdown. Kate is in quarantine with her emotionally distant teenage son, Matt, having been furloughed from her job. Once organizing the house and its memories quickly loses its appeal, Kate grows restless and decides to break her English town's strict restrictions for a late afternoon walk. Matt, unaware that his mother has left the house, is at first nonchalant when he discovers her absence but becomes increasingly anxious as night falls and Kate does not return. Meanwhile, next-door neighbor Alice knows Kate has ventured off, but she's conflicted about whether to follow protocol and contact the authorities, despite her daughter's stern urging. Alice, immunocompromised after a bout with cancer, navigates her own pandemic fatigue while ruminating on privilege and mortality in the wake of her husband's death. As the night wears on and the search for Kate intensifies, Moss' characters find themselves forced to confront their trepidations as uncharted social isolation complicates their woes. Timely and moving.

Kirkus Book Review

At the height of the pandemic lockdown, an experienced hill walker fails to return from an evening hike--then a prohibited activity--in her beloved Peak District in northern England. As her teenage son and elderly neighbor wait anxiously for bad news, a rescue party combs the treacherous moors. As lockdown restrictions confine most people to their homes, Kate--a divorced 40-year-old single mother--wonders, "When did we become a species whose default state is shut up indoors?...We're a living experiment, she thinks, in the intensive farming of humans, [though] it's all in the name of safety, not profit." This thought arises as she sets out for an illicit walk from her house up to the wild hills known as the fell. She leaves her 16-year-old son, Matt, and her phone behind, thinking that she won't be gone long, but takes her well-equipped backpack, because even this somewhat distracted woman knows how unpredictable her native terrain and weather can be. Meanwhile, Alice, Kate's elderly neighbor, is enduring not only lockdown isolation, but also the memory of a recent bout with cancer and the possibility that it's returning--and, what's more, the vital but nonetheless irksome kindness of neighbors and family. "There's a limit to how grateful you want to be, how helpless you want to feel, and she passed it a while ago. I was a whole person, she wants to say, I worked my way up, managed a team and a budget." Matt, by contrast, is the voice of youth here, home alone and afraid for his mother's safety. The fourth voice in this expertly woven narrative skein is that of Rob, the divorced father of a petulant teenage daughter and a patient man who--once Kate disappears--will search the hills all night as he and the other members of his rescue squad have done so many times before. In a familiar routine, they "clip on their radios, turn on the head torches, heft the rucksacks and set off up the track. Raindrops fall like sparks in the torchlight." This portrait of humans and their neighboring wild creatures in their natural landscape and in their altered world is darkly humorous, arrestingly honest, and intensely lyrical. These interlinked narratives evoking Britain's lockdown-altered reality are a triumph of economy and insight. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Sarah Moss is the author of Summerwater , a best book of the year in The Guardian and The Times (London), and Ghost Wall , a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a best book of the year in Elle , the Financial Times , and other publications. Her previous books include the novels Cold Earth , Night Waking , Bodies of Light , and Signs for Lost Children , and the memoir Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland . She was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.