Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Fell by Sarah Moss

The Fell by Sarah Moss

The Fell

A Novel

by Sarah Moss

  • Critics' Consensus (0):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Mar 2022, 192 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $0 for 0 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"[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.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Cloggie Downunder

Topical, evocative and moving.
“This is like the seconds between falling and landing, you know it’s going to end and you don’t want it to, all you can want now is for time to go more slowly than it does.”

The Fell is the eighth novel by best-selling British author, Sarah Moss. The audio version is narrated by Emma Lowndes. It’s November 2020 in England’s Peak District. Café waitress and single mum, Kate, and her son Matt are eight days into their two-week self-isolation due to exposure to a close contact. While Matt is happy to spend time on video games or vegging out, Kate, very much an outdoor person, has already exhausted the possibilities of decluttering, and is quickly going up the wall. But breaking quarantine would attract a huge fine that she definitely can’t afford.

In the garden late that afternoon, looking up at the fell: “It feels like another country up there, especially in winter when there’s no one around, when you can walk an hour or two before you see someone else, you and the wind and the sky. She can see from here there’s no one on the path, she’d actually be further from another soul there, less likely to pass on disease, than she is here not two meters from Alice’s garden”.

She changes into her boots, grabs a backpack and goes. “She couldn’t come within spitting distance of another person if she wanted to, out here. And she won’t be long, just an hour before sunset, she’ll be back before Matt even knows she’s gone.”

But up there “… the point is that single parents should stay alive if only to earn the money, not that she’s earning enough money, and if walking a few more minutes, another mile or so, over the darkening hill makes it easier to stay alive, what harm does it do?”

Lying on the mountain with a broken leg and other injuries, delirious, Kate’s subconscious, in the form of a snarky raven brilliantly rendered by Emma Lowndes, batters her with criticism: “What poor decisions, Kate, what ill-advised acts, set you on this path? At what point in your life, Kate, would you say it became inevitable that you would end up a criminal, alone and injured on a mountain in the dark?”

Spanning less than twenty-four hours, the story is carried by three other narratives besides Kate’s: Rob, part of the Mountain Rescue Team, leaves his teenaged daughter at home on his access weekend, much to her chagrin, to help look for Kate; Kate’s neighbor, Alice sees her pass on the path and later alerts the police when Matt, concerned for his mother, asks for help; Matt sits at home, trying to dismiss, as he waits for news from the searchers, the questions about Kate’s mental state, because his mother would never take her own life. Would she?

Moss doesn’t use quote marks for speech. Instead, each narrative reads like a stream of consciousness, making it almost forgivable. She does give the reader some gorgeous descriptive prose: “There’s no summit, exactly, just a great expanse of moorland under the sky where you can walk for hours using the rocks and lonely rowan trees for landmarks. It’s like walking on water, like walking over ocean swell, and the wind ruffling the heather and the bog cotton the way it ruffles the sea.” Topical, evocative and moving.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $0 for 0 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Sarah Moss Author Biography

Photo Credit: © Sophie Davidson

Sarah Moss is the author of the novels The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall, among other books. Her works have been named among the best books of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times, and have been selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. She was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.

Link to Sarah Moss's Website

Other books by Sarah Moss at BookBrowse

6 more...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $0 for 0 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $0 for 0 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Lilac People
    by Milo Todd
    For fans of All the Light We Cannot See, a poignant tale of a trans man’s survival in Nazi Germany and postwar Berlin.
  • Book Jacket
    Lessons in Chemistry
    by Bonnie Garmus
    Praised by Parade and The New York Times Book Review, this debut features a 1960s scientist turned TV cooking star.
  • Book Jacket
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Based on the author’s family story, comes an extraordinary novel about a mother and her daughters’ escape from Taiwan.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Awake in the Floating City
    by Susanna Kwan

    A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.

  • Book Jacket

    Serial Killer Games
    by Kate Posey

    A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).

  • Book Jacket

    Ginseng Roots
    by Craig Thompson

    A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.

  • Book Jacket

    The Original Daughter
    by Jemimah Wei

    A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

Who Said...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B W M in H M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.