Moss’s characters aren’t just connected by proximity, or even by the process of living through unparalleled crisis, but by an underlying sense of peril, both immediate, domestic and more broadly existential. Their thoughts shifting from mundane commentary or overt distractions to their keen awareness of the instability of everything around them, political divisions, fractured society, and the spectre of climate change. There are moments too of coming together, acts of kindness, shared concerns. It’s a depiction of a reality that will be familiar to many, although there are also a number of absent voices: marginal and seen only in the distance, the homeless and displaced; figures like Kate’s neighbour Samira who puts in a puzzlingly brief appearance. I was reminded at times of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours similarly preoccupied with questions of connection, and how to live, how to deal with the weight of days but – although I find aspects of Cunningham’s vision deeply flawed - The Fell is less richly descriptive, less thoughtful in its stance. Moss’s story’s almost too realistic at times, preserving rather than creatively reinventing the territory it covers. Teenage Matt often seems quite peripheral, a minor function of plot, Alice is probably the most well-realised of the group, but even here there��s a tendency to edge towards cliché. Although the slightly surreal encounter between Kate and a raven, both alone in the November night, is an interesting attempt at disrupting this rather conventional story, it felt more of a gesture than anything else, it didn’t have the eerie, mythic force of the more satisfying elements of earlier books like Cold Earth. But even though this wasn’t the compulsive read I’d hoped for, I still found it engaging enough to hold my attention.

The raven flies down the valley. It’s hours yet, till sunrise. Sheep rest where their seed, breed and generation have worn hollows in the peat, lay their dreaming heads where past sheep have lain theirs. The lovely hares sleep where the long grass folds over them. No burrows, no burial. The Saukin Stone dries in the wind. Though the stone’s feet are planted deep in the rivulets, in the bodies of trees a thousand years dead, its face takes the weather, gazes eyeless over heather and bog. Roots reach deep, bide their time. Spring will come.Likewise, even to Kate herself, the suspenseful organising drama – her potentially lethal misadventure in the hills – can seem but a minor diversion in the larger metaphysical spectacle that is, well, life in the 21st-century. It’s no surprise, then, that the novel’s ending doesn’t provide quite the release or comfort that might be expected, despite its outcome.

I found it difficult to write a review for this book mainly because it was by far the most irritating book I read in 2021. 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 * Incredibly, the author seemed to be implying that his ‘selfish’ pleasure derived from his volunteer work in some way equates his actions with those of Kate! 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 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 study in repression and displacement, Moss’s defiantly uneventful novel [is] a psychological thriller.” It'll be impossible not to relate or understand the characters in this novel - there's the person already struggling with depression, financial insecurities, the morose teenage boy, gaming and just surviving, the lonely, kind, elderly neighbour, a widow and a cancer survivor who knows she's financially privileged, but that doesn't count for much when she's desperately lonely. We also have the point of view of the elderly neighbor Alice who is sheltering at home due to the fact she is recovering from cancer. Her POV is the most Covid-relevant narrative. She muses on the restrictions and difficulties, the problems big and small, and her rather unsatisfactory relationship with her daughter’s family. A one-sitting read that's both thriller and stream of consciousness meditation on how Covid has changed our world . . . ambitious and immersive * Red *

Like Summerwater and the 2018 chef d’oeuvre Ghost Wall, The Fell is a slim book covering a lot of ground. In unfussy prose, Moss seamlessly blends quotidian concerns. “When you’re not dead, life goes on and there are buses to catch and lamb to cook,” she wrote in Cold Earth, with the most pressing issues of our time. Among her recurring preoccupations is class. Kate notes that she would have never thought it could be illegal to walk the hills alone, but “the authorities have never liked to have commoners wandering the land instead of getting and selling”. Quiet yet deeply moving . . . Moss shines in creating the stream of consciousness of fully-realized, distinct characters.”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 * Accumulating dread” is what Moss atomises so brilliantly here but it should be added that this is also a very funny book. All of the characters share a certain doomy drollness, with Alice musing on how there’s nothing quite like cooking to put you off your dinner, for instance, and Kate wondering of a raven that accompanies her on her illegal hike: “Are you a spirit guide or my mother? Oh God, what if it’s both.”

And then, there's my favorite tea quote: "And tea, Mum'll be glad to find tea in the pot when she comes in." Perhaps Moss was just dramatizing the horrible endless kitchen-sink drudgery and banality of those days spent cooking, housecleaning, and online, but while I could personally relate to surviving months of Groundhog Days, I didn't want to relive them, and these characters' experiences with loneliness and isolation just felt flat and banal to me. That’s how I reacted to The Fell: baking bread and biscuits, a family catch-up on Zoom, repainting and clearouts, even obsessive hand-washing … the references were worn out well before a draft was finished. Ironic though it may seem, I feel like I’ve found more cogent commentary about our present moment from Moss’s historical work. Yet I’ve read all of her fiction and would still list her among my favourite contemporary writers. Aspiring creative writers could approach the Summerwater/ The Fell duology as a masterclass in perspective, voice and concise plotting. But I hope for something new from her next book.I was not as impressed as others by the writing style but was quite good even though I tend to dislike stream of consciousness. However, it was not good enough to elevate my opinion of this book. Expertly woven . . . 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 . . . A triumph of economy and insight.”