The Fell
A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
