Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2022
192 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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 out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period, but she just 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. She lies injured, unable to move, her furtive walk suddenly a mountain rescue operation―or a missing persons case.
A story of compassion and kindness, Sarah Moss's The Fell is suspenseful, witty, and wise, and it asks probing questions about who we are in the world, who we are to our neighbors, and who we are when the world demands we shut ourselves away.
"[An] expertly woven narrative...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." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"A swift, nuanced tale about converging lives over the course of one evening during a pandemic lockdown...Timely and moving." - Booklist
"There is always the electric touch of danger lacing its fingers through [Moss's work]...It's the end of the world, seen from a particular angle only the incisive Sarah Moss could show us." - Lit Hub
"The Fell is a funny, savage novel about the very recent past, and seems to do the impossible: hold a story that is still unfolding immobile enough to integrate into fiction." - The Guardian (UK)
"A slim, tense page-turner that captures the weird melancholia of locked-down life but also the precious warmth of human connection. I gulped The Fell down in one sitting." - Emma Donoghue, author of The Pull of the Stars
"Sarah Moss seems to have achieved the impossible: she has written a gripping, thoughtful, and revelatory book about lockdown." - Paula Hawkins, author of A Slow Fire Burning
"The Fell reflects the lives we have been living for the last eighteen months in a way no other writer has dared to do. 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." - Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson's Beetle
This information about The Fell was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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