Translating her fury at the impact on individuals into fiction was, however, a different matter. For a time she was, like many of us, “overwhelmed by the various kinds of fear and anxiety”, uncertain that our experiences could be represented in art and culture. A keen theatre-goer, she resisted watching live performances digitally “because they just made me desperately sad. I mean, I do not want to watch a live-stream play with no audience. I want to be in the theatre, and if I can’t be in the theatre, I’d rather have nothing.” Moss is a “compulsive runner”, she says, “and it’s not about fitness or weight or sport or any of that. It’s just about being out in a body, feet on the stones and rain in the hair.” In terms of her fiction, she says, “I think the reason I’m interested in ‘bad’ weather is because that is when you’re most aware of your own embodiment in the world; when your skin is being rained on and your hair is being blown around. You really know you’re alive when you’re most physically present to the world and the elements.” I’m interested in ‘bad’ weather because that is when you’re most aware of your own embodiment in the world The Fell explores the way individual freedom conflicts with collective responsibility . . . [It] crystalizes our shared moment of global danger and allows us to observe its different facets.” A masterfully tense, deeply empathetic novel about lives stilled and reexamined, and the uncertainty and danger of the world that surrounds them. I was completely riveted by the central questions of its narrative, and by its tender, insightful exploration of the times we are living through.” One of the things I liked best about Summerwater were the various bits from the POV of animals and nature at large (a technique I also really liked in Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13; coincidentally also about a person gone missing while on a hike in the Peak District), and while Kate does hallucinate a conversation with a raven, the following was definitely to my tastes:

A study in repression and displacement, Moss’s defiantly uneventful novel [is] a psychological thriller.” Carefully, affectingly and with emotional veracity, Moss opens out Alice's secrets along with everyone else's: the mortal fears, the losses, the mistakes. Moss writes so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist's can be * The Times * I found it difficult to write a review for this book mainly because it was by far the most irritating book I read in 2021. And now she is required to isolate for two weeks, deprived of the socialization of her job and hikes in the Peak District.This is a book about three families in the pandemic. How life changes forever, how almost everybody struggles to keep their incomes, try to deal with children, worried about prices, and all that. A 4-star book, a little sad and dark for me. I was not as impressed as others by the writing style but was quite good even though I tend to dislike stream of consciousness. However, it was not good enough to elevate my opinion of this book. Accumulating dread” is what Moss atomises so brilliantly here but it should be added that this is also a very funny book. All of the characters share a certain doomy drollness, with Alice musing on how there’s nothing quite like cooking to put you off your dinner, for instance, and Kate wondering of a raven that accompanies her on her illegal hike: “Are you a spirit guide or my mother? Oh God, what if it’s both.” The author's lyrical yet restrained style is so lovely, and here again the prose is a stream of consciousness style that feels right in the claustrophobic context. But I have to wonder, as I do with Julie Otsuka and her clinging to the second person voice, if she will offer the reader another aspect of her writing. Perhaps Moss was just dramatizing the horrible endless kitchen-sink drudgery and banality of those days spent cooking, housecleaning, and online, but while I could personally relate to surviving months of Groundhog Days, I didn't want to relive them, and these characters' experiences with loneliness and isolation just felt flat and banal to me.

The Fell is very much a novel of our time . . . it takes note of the moment, and captures what seemed unimaginable even a year before it was set. But it also offers hope . . . there may be a time when what is described here is, indeed, in the past, and a novel like The Fell will help us to remember * Church Times * Matt, 16, a touching character despite himself, is oblivious at first, and though Kate is spotted by their widowed neighbour, Alice, the older woman has been shielding for months so doesn’t stop her. Only the fourth of Moss’s characters, divorced Rob, has licence to be out and about; the fact that he soon will be, with night falling and the fog closing in, is a very bad sign indeed for Kate, because he is part of the mountain rescue service. One of its most unsettling attributes is the way it questions that elemental source of human succour: storytelling In real life, I would have immediately leapt to sanctimonious judgment about brazen breakers of the Covid rules who thoughtlessly inflict their virality upon the old, infirm, and immunosuppressed, in radical denial of the common good. But I will admit found some measure of empathy for Kate, a vegetarian hippie who doesn't fit the profile of the right-wing anti-masker next door.The Fell, with its one day in a pandemic focus, felt rather pedestrian and depressing. Kate, a furloughed single mom, is the main character and her quarantine breaking towards the hills behind her English village home goes very awry. Her teenage son Matt is game addicted, a recreational drugs user and in general bored. Then we have a bit better of elderly neighbour who very much fears the virus due to her recovering from cancer. Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read The Fell by Sarah Moss, I have given my honest review. People primarily feeling sorry about themselves, or if not overtly that, then minutely describing what causes them inconvenience or self doubt. This first longer fiction I read about COVID-19 disappointed me. She falls and breaks a leg and is stranded on the moors as night falls. There is another voice on the moors, a Raven. We are not in Poe territory here, as one reviewer has pointed out, it’s more the blasted heath of Lear and the Raven makes a good Fool. There is a gothic edge to the second half:

Moss has always been adept at plumbing the psyche’s inkier depths, and as she flits between people, channelling the free indirect style that gave her last novel, Summerwater, such polyphonic momentum, their anxieties heighten a gathering sense of existential doom. Interestingly, though these span everything from the climate emergency to the degradation of language and zombie mink, Covid itself is way down the list, functioning more as an intensifying trigger. In addition to the drama of the search mission, we’re privy to the other characters’ concerns through their interior monologues. Rob is mourning the loss of a friend in a climbing accident he witnessed and butting heads with his teenage daughter, who accuses him of preferring the mountain to spending time with her, as her mother did before she and Rob divorced. One way of coping with this knowledge is to wax apocalyptic. Another is to find fair and just ways to live together – while we’re going through it, and after. Kate removes herself from the daily hum of pandemic life, and can see more clearly. Achieving this kind of perspective is precisely what fiction sets out to do, and what Moss does with great sensitivity. “There will be holes in the children’s education, a generation that’s forgotten or never learnt how to go to a party, people of all ages who won’t forget to be afraid to leave the house, to be afraid of other people, afraid to touch or dance or sing, to travel, to try on clothes – whisht, she thinks again, hush now. Walk.” The Fell is a short novel that takes place in Northern England, in November 2020, when the pandemic was in a full-blown mode in the UK. It all takes place over one day. Told via four PoVs, we hear the characters' stories and how they're dealing and coping with the pandemic and the rules imposed by the government - staying put, not congregating with others, social distancing and curfews.Yes at first, there were so many grump and fuss about limitations. I know it's hard and has a serious of consequences, but really? So bad you compare with world wars?! The only thing we have to do is stay at home, Okay it's our home, is it so awful? I'm not going to judge but this was too much. Though at least there were dances in the war, weren’t there, and concerts, and sex, lots of sex, at least people were allowed to see each other." An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. There is wit, there is compassion, there is a tension that builds like a pressure cooker. This slim, intense masterpiece is one of my best books of the year.” It'll be impossible not to relate or understand the characters in this novel - there's the person already struggling with depression, financial insecurities, the morose teenage boy, gaming and just surviving, the lonely, kind, elderly neighbour, a widow and a cancer survivor who knows she's financially privileged, but that doesn't count for much when she's desperately lonely.