The Fell

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Kate, an unhappy one, who couldn't stay in a place, if see her from the good side, an outdoor person. She is a single mum and really cares about her teenage son. In the beginning, she was just looking irresponsible. You see, with some patience, characters reveal themselves and this was beautiful. Alice, widowed and lonely, is shielding after cancer treatment. She wonders if “maybe she’ll die without ever touching another human”. Over an on-screen dinner, her daughter threatens to call the police on Kate for breaking the rules even though she and Matt have been helping Alice by doing her grocery shopping. “Sometimes Alice thinks she’d rather have a Radio 4 podcast than Susie with her dinner.” 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.”

Moss steps into other people's shoes with impressive ease. Her prose is clear, low-key and compelling, its power incremental . . . The Fell is about the hazards that lurk at the edges of life. Feelingly, but without sentimentality, Moss explores what happens when you find yourself teetering on the precipice * Herald * If we’ve learned anything from this past year, it’s that autonomy is as illusory in real life as it is for fictional characters. Mia Levitin

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. 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 Quiet yet deeply moving . . . Moss shines in creating the stream of consciousness of fully-realized, distinct characters.” 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

Things go badly wrong for Kate and it changes what's only been a theoretical crisis into a real crisis. The narrative revolves between the perspectives of Kate, Matt, their older neighbour Alice who is shielding at home and rescue worker Rob. It movingly follows the mental process many of us have gone through when confined at home with all the attendant fear, boredom, frustration and self-pity as well as feelings of guilt for reacting like this when we reason that there are other people who are suffering in more severe ways than we are. 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: 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.”Indeed, one of the most profoundly unsettling attributes of The Fell is the way it questions that elemental source of human succour: storytelling . . . ‘Accumulating dread’ is what Moss atomises so brilliantly here but it should be added that this is also a very funny book.” 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 Ghost Wall is the story of a teenage girl who goes on a historical re-enactment weekend with her family. It focuses on her relationship with her dad, an angry, violent man obsessed with the iron age”. In spite of his brutishness, he’s not a character without sympathy, which, says Moss, “wasn’t even a literary move; it’s just how I think about people. A literary defence would be that it’s boring to write a monster, and actually people are more complicated than that. But also I just don’t believe in monsters. 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. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.