The Fell

January 31, 2022
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.

February 1, 2022
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.

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April 9, 2022

This latest from Moss (Summerwater) is a COVID story. Single mother Kate and her teenage son Matt are midway through their enforced two-week quarantine after an exposure to the coronavirus. Already, Matt has become bored with his video games and has turned to homework. Kate, stir crazy after decluttering her home and doing a little late fall gardening, rashly decides to take a short hike up the fell beyond their garden, reasoning that she is unlikely to meet up with anyone out there. Although she neglects to take her phone or leave a note for Matt, her neighbor Alice sees her leave. So Matt and Alice are equally worried when Kate doesn't return by nightfall. The quandary: do they wait it out and hope she'll make it back home, or do they report her missing and risk her receiving a heavy fine for breaking quarantine? VERDICT Is it too soon for pandemic-era novels? For anyone who can bear a reminder of lockdowns, masking, isolation, and social distancing while still living through them, this fast-paced gem is worth the novel exposure.--Barbara Love

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Starred review from January 15, 2022
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.

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