The Fell

Critics Review

• 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

• Carefully, affectingly and with emotional veracity, Moss opens out Alice’s secrets along with everyone else’s: the mortal fears, the losses, the mistakes. Moss writes so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist’s can be

  The Times

• With The Fell, Sarah Moss seems to have achieved the impossible: she has written a gripping, thoughtful and revelatory book about lockdown

  Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

• A funny, savage novel

  Guardian

• Absorbing . . . ingeniously done . . there’s an intoxicating flow to much of the writing . . . a humane, thoughtful reflection on the lockdown experience

  Scotsman

• The Fell reflects the lives we have been living for the last 18 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

• A one-sitting read that’s both thriller and stream of consciousness meditation on how Covid has changed our world . . . ambitious and immersive

  Red

• Moss is strong on pastoral lyricism, and her characteristic humour is as piercing here as in her previous novels . . . The Fell eloquently explores many of the big issues we have been facing since March 2020

  The Times

• A masterfully tense, deeply empathetic novel about lives stilled and re-examined, and the uncertainty and danger of the world that surrounds them. I was completely riveted by the central questions of its narrative, and by its tender, insightful exploration of the times we are living through

  Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From

• Again and again, and always with steely precision, Moss has mined both the circumstances and the consequences of isolation . . . one of the very best British novelists writing today about contemporary life – if anyone can justify writing a pandemic novel, she’s the woman for the job

  Daily Telegraph

• She conjures the fretful confinement of the pandemic with colossal skill . . . deft and evocative . . . the operation to rescue Kate is nail-biting. There are also scenes of unbearable poignancy . . . shrewd and moving

  i

• The pandemic is spawning some fine writing, and this helter-skelter novel by Moss is one of the best yet. The book captures both the paranoia of the times and the kindness of strangers

  Mail on Sunday

• The novel’s chief achievement is the way it calcifies a specific moment in recent history . . . Moss perfectly simulates the stifling psychological confinement and ennui of locked-down life . . . Moss writes evocatively of the stark beauty of the countryside . . . a neat, atmospheric novel

  Literary Review

• [The Fell] leaves the reader on tenterhooks as the story builds to its conclusion. Moss perfectly captures Kate and Alice’s self-isolation-induced claustrophobia . . . Some readers might not want to immerse themselves in the cabin fever of early lockdown so soon after living through it, but Moss makes a strong case for social connection being as important as our physical health for survival

  Daily Mirror

• 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

• The Fell is very much a novel of our time . . . it takes note of the moment, and captures what seemed unimaginable even a year before it was set. But it also offers hope . . . there may be a time when what is described here is, indeed, in the past, and a novel like The Fell will help us to remember

  Church Times

• It seems ever more important that fiction acknowledge the truths the pandemic has revealed to us: how connected we all are, and how much we fear one another

  Guardian

• Moss is brilliant at creating a feeling of mounting peril . . . Her humour is so black it’s treacly She’s also one of our best writers on the natural world . . . [The Fell] confirms that Sarah Moss is a writer of remarkable power, control and deftness. She’s funny, observant and very much of the moment

  Oldie