This is the first book I have read by Sarah. Moss. The Fell, a short book, I finished it in a few hours. I liked the writing style, soon getting used to no speech marks and think it actually makes more impact on the reader. The story is set during the first lockdown in the 2020 pandemic and tells how the lockdown affects the mental health of the main characters, namely Kate, Matt, Alice and Rob. Kate is a poorly paid waitress and a single parent with a teenage son, Matt. Alice, their next door neighbour, is shielding because she is recovering from chemotherapy for breast cancer, and Rob, is on the Peak District rescue team. It describes Zoom meetings people had with their families, tells how others did little acts of kindness like shopping for neighbours when they couldn’t get an online delivery slot from the supermarket, preparing snacks and leaving them on the doorstep of a friend’s house (despite wondering if it was safe to do so in case they would spread the virus. Kate and Matt are self isolating as they have been in contact with a positive Covid case, but after 10 days, Kate becomes so claustrophobic she breaks the law by going out for a quick walk. She is used being outdoors on the fells. Sarah describes what happens next, the feelings and thoughts of all the characters, the moments of distress and fear and the chat Kate has with the raven. The book is both thought provoking and mundane. At many times it is so very realistic, all these things could actually have happened. My thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for an arc of this intriguing book.

This is the third Sarah Moss book that I have read after Ghost Wall and Summerwater and I've bought most of her back catalogue now to catch up with her writing.

I love the way that the author absolutely gets inside the heads of her various protagonists in The Fell and so beautifully captures the feelings of each character at the height of the pandemic. I read the whole book in a day because I was so desperate to find out what had happened.

A thoroughly recommended read.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

Having read Sarah Moss previously and thoroughly enjoyed, I jumped at the chance to review this latest offering. However I didn’t realise that is was set during recent events concerning lockdown/pandemic. So although the writing style is exquisite, the topic at this moment in time just wasn’t right for me, unfortunately I dnf’d approximately a third of the way through.

The fell by Sarah moss

Thank you to the publishers for an ARC via NetGalley for an honest review

This short novel takes place over one day at the height of the first Covid lockdown in 2020. It follows Kate and her son Matt, her neighbour, Alice and Rob who is a mountain rescue volunteer in the Peak District.

Kate and Matt are isolating as they’ve been in contact with someone who tested positive. Alice is shielding because she is recovering from chemotherapy for breast cancer and Rob has his teenage daughter for his weekend. Their stories are told in alternating chapters. In many ways, the landscape is a fifth character too.

Kate can’t take it. She is used to being outside in the Peaks ( the names of which are like poetry) and she snaps and goes outside for a ‘sip’ of air. She doesn’t tell anyone or take her phone as she’s just popping out. She won’t be long. What harm can it do?

I found this novel profoundly moving and beautifully written, the scene with Alice and Matt on her doorstep were particularly well observed. It was also very funny in parts ( Kate’s conversations with the Raven ). The different voices rang true to me and the endless inner dialogues expressed the moods of the nation in those tricky to navigate times with multiple anxieties and competing priorities: climate change, law breaking, rights and responsibilities, making food gifts ( should you leave a Tupperware of cake on someone’s doorstep?) reporting on your neighbours, mink, cooking, cleaning; Covid being quite far down the list! The arguments we all had even if only internally about risk taking, mask wearing, vaccines are all played out in this increasingly doom laden story.

I loved how there were touching moments of kindness and utter normality : zoom dinners with grandchildren , bottom of the fridge meals, neighbours shopping for each other in among the increasingly sad analysis of the restrictions brought in to limit the spread of the pandemic. I have had debates about how can going for a walk by yourself in the open be banned? How can it be possible for the government to make walking outside illegal? But this is not an overtly political or critical book. It is merely addressing the time we all lived through, got through, surviving or not.

The style of language in which it was written was a bit free form, a stream of consciousness without speech marks or any other delineation and this added to the atmosphere of suspense. There is a very real sense of impending doom and dread building up which is not resolved by the ending and we don’t find out how the four deal with the final consequences of Kate’s decision to break the law ( just a little bit) .

I’ve not read any other novels set during the pandemic but I imagine this will stand the test of time. Compassionate, witty, humane. Highly recommend

The Fell by Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss continues to document contemporary social issues in her latest book. Here it is the experience of the pandemic and the effects of isolation. Kate has to isolate after coming into contact with a covid carrier. She has always been an avid hill walker on The Fells just behind her house and takes a snap decision to take a walk, even though it is illegal as she has been told to quarantine. But Kate justifies this decision because her mental health is suffering and she surmises she will meet no one The Fell as the night is approaching. But then Kate has an accident and suddenly it is a serious criminal and social offense she has committed.

The stream of consciousness narrative is driven by Kate and three other characters, her son Matt, her neighbour Alice, who is high risk and so has been isolating for the duration of the pandemic and Rob who works for mountain rescue. All the characters have their own experiences of isolating and social distancing. And they all struggle with what is right and what is wrong, particularly Kate who is in the most precarious position. Matt is only 15 years old and has to make the decision to report his mum missing, knowing she would get into trouble, and also has to wait for news from the rescue team on his own. The neighbour Alice is recently widowed and has been recovering from cancer treatment. She has had to remain in her home completely alone but she constantly berates herself for any negative emotions.

As you would expect from this author the writing is impeccable and few writers can conjure the natural world and the feeling of being exposed to the elements like Moss can. The characters are all believable, Alice and Matt are also very likable and Kate is depicted in a sympathetic light. Sarah Moss is brilliant at depicting the internal social anxieties and conflicts that we all struggle with. I sympathised greatly with Alice’s conflict about putting too many biscuits on her shopping list for fear of being judged harshly by Kate and Matt who were doing the shopping for her. But overall the story really fell flat for me. It felt like well trodden ground and it didn’t feel like it added any insight from the pandemic experience that hasn’t been written about in columns, journals and blogs. I was disappointed that the ending of her last novel felt underwhelming but sadly this applies to the whole of my reading of this book.

I’ve been reading Sarah Moss’s books since I was lucky enough to receive a proof copy of her eerie fiction debut, Cold Earth, way back in 2009, and I have read all the fiction she’s ever published. However, I’ve long been waiting for her to write a novel that I really, really love; The Tidal Zone probably came closest as a whole, while Cold Earth and Night Waking (which I’ve reviewed twice!) frustrated me with their moments of brilliance. The Fell, her latest novella, has made me realise that it’s perhaps time to give up this hope, as I don’t think Moss’s writing is moving in a direction that fits what I want from fiction. Like her previous novella, Summerwater, The Fell is told in stream-of-consciousness through multiple voices. Set in the month-long Covid-19 lockdown of November 2020, it focuses on Kate, a struggling single mum who can’t bear the constraints of her two-week isolation period any longer and so secretly strikes out alone onto the moors. We also hear from Kate’s teenage son, Matt; mountain rescue volunteer Rob; and Kate’s next-door neighbour Alice, who is shielding after having had breast cancer and lives alone after the death of her husband.

I imagine some people would have fits if they saw that I’ve tagged The Fell as a ‘historical novel’ on my blog, but that’s what it feels like to me, set in a specific time, place and mindset that seems very long ago. This, I think, is going to be the problem faced by writers who want to write realistic fiction about the Covid-19 pandemic; it’s all so tiringly familiar and yet already out-of-date; it’s neither of the moment or of its time. This is the first fiction I’ve read to tackle Covid-19, but it already feels full of cliche. The overall message of this novella, conveyed none-too-subtly through anecdotes about baby monkeys clinging to cloth mothers and comforting voices easing patients’ need for pain relief, is that we all need human connection to be truly happy, and there is no real substitute. Moss lays it on even more thickly when the mountain rescue team pull together to rescue an injured Kate. The problem is that we’ve heard nothing else but the importance of human interaction since the start of this pandemic, so this really doesn’t feel like it needs to be said. It evades both more interesting questions about the value and pain of solitude and totally ignores the fact that everyone’s experience of the pandemic wasn’t sitting at home being bored and baking bread, being able to take walks in their private front gardens when they felt too cooped up. In this, it rehearses observations that are already so familiar from social media and journalism: ‘Social distancing, whoever came up with that, there’s not much that’s less social than acting as if everyone’s unclean and dangerous, though the problem of course is that they are, or at least some of them are and there’s no way of knowing.’ No lockdown fanatics or ‘freedom’ protesters here; everyone in this novella reluctantly accepts the need for lockdown and complains about it politely.

These, perhaps, are problems that would face any novelist who is one of the first to write about Covid-19, but I think this topic also posed particular problems for Moss. Alywnne writes in their Goodreads review of The Fell that ‘Moss’s story’s almost too realistic at times, preserving rather than creatively reinventing the territory it covers.’ This, I think, is spot-on, and explains my frustration with Moss’s more recent fiction, which has moved away from both the imaginative exploration of Cold Earth and the visceral historical material evoked in Night Waking, Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children, but yet is too slight and insubstantial when compared to the more realistic The Tidal Zone. Moss’s characters have started to feel too comfortable, too similar in their world-views, and her thinking a little stale. This passage near the end of The Fell is so sub-Reservoir 13 (and I thought Reservoir 13 was sub-Jon McGregor anyway!):

'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 aquifers, 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.'

While, taken on its own, this is beautiful writing, the passage feels totally unearnt within the context of the novel, which doesn’t spend much time focusing on the connections between nature and humanity (and you really have to earn a line like ‘spring will come’). It feels like it was pulled from a draft of Summerwater, which also tried this trick (and while I didn’t like it there either, it was at least a theme more convincingly woven through the novel).

It’s a shame to write a review like this for a writer whose work I’ve enjoyed so much in the past; I hope Moss’s next book takes a different direction.

Of course pandemic literature will be a thing for a long time to come; when such a devastating crisis has such an impact on so many, of course we want to see our experiences reflected and documented for the future, possibly some with more distance from events than others.

In The Fell, we meet Kate, single mother to Matt, cafe worker on furlough, struggling with money and mental-health, self-isolating after a colleague gets ill.; Matt himself, a sensible but struggling teenager missing his friends; Alice, their neighbour, recovering from cancer and shielding, and her daughter Paula, burnt-out from working all hours and home schooling her own children. When Kate can't cope with staying indoors any more, she breaks quarantine and heads out into the countryside for a walk, and doesn't return.

Moss captures the claustrophobia and feeling of being trapped very accurately, the confusion of the constant changes to COVID restrictions, the fear and horror that things will never be "normal" again, along with the guilt felt by those who haven't got it that bad, not really, but who are feeling the constant overwhelming impact of the pandemic as well.

One of the most interesting plot points, in my opinion, is Matt's hesitation to report his mother's disappearance to the police despite his increasing concern for her well-being. Remember those Blitz-spirit, community-minded, hopelessly-naive types who popped up on your local Facebook group back in late March 2020, claiming that COVID would transform society, make us all kinder and nicer to our neighbours, the more vulnerable around us? Well, by November, when The Fell is set, they've all had enough. Moss describes the paranoia and self-righteousness of the people who consider themselves to be doing everything right, the speed with which they will denounce and report their own neighbours for breaching lockdown rules. It's pretty terrifying.

This short novel is just a snapshot of the pandemic, but one of the final sentences brings us full circle from it's very beginning and offers the only hope we can cling onto - "Spring will come... Life, then, to be lived somehow".

An exploration of COVID and its effects on individuals. It voices many of the feelings people may or will have endured at the time of lockdown. Kate, the central character cannot cope with the isolation imposed on her by having been in contact with an infected person and has to escape up The Fell. A foolhardy venture that leads her to greater isolation and we follow her wandering thoughts processes. Her actions bring into play the other characters, her neighbour Alice , extremely vulnerable, Matt her son and Rob from the mountain rescue team.
An insightful and thought provoking novel about a time we have all shared

This story is exactly what it says in the blurb. A wistful look at the world during the pandemic, reflecting on the possible effects of it on everyday folk.
Kate: a young single mother, struggling with life in lockdown, furloughed, finding herself in two interminable weeks of isolation. Alice: the elderly widowed neighbour, a vulnerable person finding the loneliness and distance from her family increasingly challenging.
Matt: Kate’s young son, trying to deal with normal teenage stuff, whilst supporting his mum.
Throw in some real tension and fear throughout this well-written book, clearly capturing the new changed world, the effect of missing human connections and highlighting issues that may affect the world for years to come.
A book to reflect upon rather than a fast-paced action.

An intriguing short novel about a small group of people and how they are navigating the pandemic. Set in one day when Kate who has had enough of self-isolating goes for a walk on the deserted fell at dusk, leaving her 16 year old son at home. The author explores each person's point of view and through them their experience of the pandemic, from the older woman shielding, the teen age daughter who is left at home when the Mountain rescue team are mobilised, Kate and her son Matt. With witty and wise reflections on the state of the world, this is also a tense story of suspense, a thoughtful page turner, that can be read in one sitting.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

There is a rash of COVID books coming out at the moment - which is fair enough but it does feel a bit like tempting fate as we aren't out of it just yet. This book sums up the claustrophobia, fear, panic and mind numbing boredom of lockdown. The ever changing rules which did not always make sense - why was walking outside so dangerous? There are a number of characters - the lady whose mental health is suffering and just needs to get out, her son who needs to get help for his mother but doesn't want to get her in trouble, the lady next door who wants to help the son but can't, and the search and rescue man who is delighted by a call out so that he can get outside.

A great snapshot of where we were last November - please don't let there be a repeat this year!

This slight and seemingly simple novel could be one that survives as the marker of the pandemic in Britain in 2020. The rules, procedures, terminologies, expectations and contradictions – and of course the real face of “we are all in it together”. It is told through simple testimonies of just a few people living on the edge of the Peak District and through them we will see a small cluster more. Life is of course an admixture of the old “normal” and strange new habits of pandemic response behaviour and the stresses that this caused.
First we are introduced to “Dad” of teenage Ellie – it is “his” weekend and she will be mightily miffed (in that easily recognised way) when he, a member of the Mountain Rescue Team, is called out on an emergency. He is not usually on call, but there are three members of the team “isolating” so he is filling in. Welcome to Covid. His story will develop over an arduous night. Ironically he will admit that he finds great satisfaction in stretching himself physically on the feels in the dark, albeit offset by the worries of what he might find.
Enter sixteen year old Matt, he lives with his mother Kate. He is not in school and has to work through his lessons alone and online – he is not seeing his best friend. Kate, a vegetarian, would usually be working in a café giving her both an income and company. But she has been first “furloughed” giving her less money to live on and now faces serious financial difficulties and worries in spite of her vegetable garden. She has now been told to isolate for a fortnight and she is no longer allowed to go out – and more critically walk the fells which she regularly does to de-stress, essential to her mental health.
Matt has been helping out his elderly next door neighbour Alice who is “extremely vulnerable” as she has had cancer. She is coping with the recent grief of the loss of her long term husband. Her only family contact is with her daughter Susie but that is by phone. Susie has very clear ideas of how her mother should or should not behave, but suffers her own package of disgruntlements as she “works extremely long hours still” while others sit on their backsides and “do nothing” while enjoying large furlough payments. Mothers can be downloaded onto. With Matt and Kate “isolating, the little contact they have with Alice is more restricted. She has to cope with deeper isolation and resolve what is the difference between wishes and true need.
But the challenge of the novel is that when in a pandemic an immediate crisis arises how far will people go to step outside the new “rules”? that some (not all) are trying to follow for the greater good.
That is the basis of the novel. No doubt many readers will have heard variations of similar in their own lives from friends, family and neighbours as they de-stress. The irony in this tale, as it has been in “real” life, is that people are restricting their lives to keep theoretical “others” safe from the disease. The disease has not directly impacted anybody in the book - the difficulties, illnesses (both physical and increasingly mental) are seemingly “in spite of” not because of – or are they? So the underlying question is, with this being the case, how hard has the last year really been? Is it just people’s perspectives that are awry, or is it quietly impacting on people with earlier weaknesses that we as a wider community have not resolved? Maybe it might still be too early, and thus we are too close, to read this book with a clear understanding of the complexities and costs hinted at.

The Fell is a short but powerful page-turner which combines a suspenseful plot with a far-reaching meditation on the world we are living in and how this has changed since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The novel is set in November 2020, and alternates between the perspectives of four characters: Kate and her teenage son Matt, who are both self-isolating as close contacts of positive cases; their elderly widowed neighbour, Alice, who is clinically vulnerable and has spent the last eight months shielding; and Rob, a divorced father who volunteers with the local mountain search and rescue team. The action unfolds over a single night, and is very simple: Kate breaks quarantine to go walking alone up the hill, but falls and injures herself. Suspense is created as we wonder when Matt and Alice will work out where she has gone, whether the rescue team will get there in time, and what the consequences will be if they find her.

A number of novels responding to the pandemic are starting to appear - while others, such as Sarah Hall's Burntcoat use Covid-19 for the jumping-off point to imagine a much more deadly virus and the possible effects of this, Sarah Moss's novel is very much anchored in the quotidian realities of last autumn, meaning that it is both a thriller and a state-of-the-nation novel.

Moss's characterisation is intimate and compassionate, so we feel with Matt the boredom of confinement, with Kate the mounting financial worries and the terror at the thought of a crippling fine for breaking quarantine, and with Alice the loneliness of shielding, the inadequacy of Zoom calls with her judgemental daughter and the fear that she may never experience normal life again. The novel documents the ways in which the pandemic has turned people against each other, but there are also some unsentimentally moving moments of human connection, particularly between Matt and Alice as each seeks ways to protect and comfort the other whilst needing to stay apart.

I wonder whether the potency of the novel might actually increase with time: just occasionally, Moss's chronicling of everything her characters experienced during 2020 feels a little redundant while these events are still so fresh in our minds, but in a decade's time, these minutiae may serve as a powerful record of what we lived through.

I would definitely recommend this slender but profound novel. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

Many current books treat the Covid pandemic in one of two ways. They either try and incorporate it into the plot or they just ignore it all together and imagine a world in which it just didn’t happen. In Sarah Moss’s latest book The Fell, Covid and the impacts of quarantine and isolation due to Covid on British people is central to the plot.
The Fell centres around four characters. Kate and her teenage son Matt are in isloation following a close contact. The two live in a small house with a garden on the edge of The Peak District. They had been doing the shopping for their elderly neighbour Alice who keeps in touch with her family by eating meals with them over video calls. And finally there is Rob, part of mountain rescue who is brought in to search for Kate after she goes for an illegal walk into the Peaks at dusk and goes missing.
Much like her previous book, Summerwater, The Fell is stream of consciousness writing. Long rambling paragraphs that give deep insight into the state of mind of each character. As with Moss’s other work, each of the four characters emerges vividly from this treatment. And central to that state of mind is the impacts of the lockdown – the fear of human contact but also of breaking the law, the need to protect society by staying indoors, the crushing nature of isolation when wide open spaces where one can be truly alone beckon across the back fence, the tension between wanting to help and abiding by the new social normal. Even badly injured, freezing and in pain when Kate considers being rescued she hides away, worried about the reaction to the fact that she broke her isolation and may be jailed as a result. But even in around that she explores the small moments of kindness that make it all bearable – Matt and Kate shopping for Alice, Alice giving biscuits to Matt.
While Covid still rages, now that most of the world is out of lockdown, The Fell almost feels like a piece of historical fiction. But it is an important piece, a reflection on a giant global psychological experiment that separated people from each other, locked people in their houses and criminalised movement. And while Moss deals with this deeply and compassionately and does not go for any sort of resolution or easy answers, for some, that history may be a little too recent to make the journey enjoyable.

During the second UK lockdown in November 2020, a woman decides to break quarantine and go for a walk in the moors. The woman, named Kate, falls and badly injures herself. The Fell is a compact novella which shines a light on the complex emotions that came with living through a global pandemic.

Although this is a slim story, this is a sharp and incredibly rich text. Moss shifts between the perspectives of Kate, her son Matt, and neighbour Alice. The three characters capture different views of the lockdown in the UK. Kate justifies breaking quarantine because she is going on a solitary walk, which her neighbour Alice witnesses from her house and disapproves.

With November 2020’s lockdown being in the recent past, I was unsure how I would feel reading about it. Moss skilfully captures the mundanity and the weirdness of quarantine. The Fell illustrates the intensity of living in such a small space with little physical interaction with others.

Moss is brilliant at weaving political subtext into her stories. Kate’s selfish decisions could potentially harm others but it is easy to sympathise with her and understand her reasoning. The Fell is topical and captures all of the anxieties surrounding the pandemic.

I am interested to watch this book age. I cannot wait to return to this again with some distance from the events of 2020 and review my feelings then. Again, I think it would be interesting to see people read this in, say, 50 years’ time who do not have any personal connections to the pandemic and see their commentary. Overall, this will be a staple piece in 21st century British literature.

I hadn't realsied when I started reading this book that it was set during the pandemic - I'm glad I didnt as I might have been put off and I would have missed out on yet another wonderfyl book by Sarah Moss.
Its told from the point of view of 3 people and it really captures the feelings and sometimes torment that people have flet over the last two years.
Its a short read but it packs a punch.
I'd defintely recommend.

This is the first pandemic/lockdown story I’ve read since March 2020 but this was really interesting. An intimate look at how the lockdowns affected people and how they’ve changed us. Heavily focused on loneliness and death and how Covid has adjusted our thought processes on “normal everyday life”.

Moss’ writing style is so simple and easy to read, I got through this book in just over 2 hours. A medium paced story but one you can easily and quickly lose yourself in.

Ad-gifted by Pan Macmillan & Picador via Netgalley.

A novel set during the pandemic isn’t something I’d usually rush to read, but I knew I’d be in safe hands with Sarah Moss. I thought Ghostwall and Summerwater were excellent, both short books which were so much bigger than they’d seem. Thrillingly The Fell was the same.

It was an acute observation of the complexities of human emotions and behaviour faced with such a massive life-changing event.

The characters are very well-built, flaws and all. There’s an increasing air of tension and the sense of place is vividly brought to life in the author’s sparse writing style.

As a Peak District dwelling, outdoor loving mum, I could easily identify with Kate’s longing to get outside along with the trust in her instincts and experience to take her on a familiar walk without any problems. And the guilt and worries that followed after her accident.

I came away with more understanding of the emotions of other people and how they dealt with the pandemic restrictions.

I felt this novel had a strong and timely message about the strength of nature over human beings.

It was an incredibly thought-provoking novel that I’ll definitely be re-reading. On the strength of this and her previous two novels, Sarah Moss has become an auto-buy author for me.

This is the first I’ve read by this author and I was instantly attracted to her writing style.

The story follows the main characters Kate, her son Matt, neighbour Alice and mountain rescue volunteer, Rob. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic second national lockdown we find Kate and Matt in the middle of a 14 day quarantine. Kate is a struggling single mum, who like many, has had her world turned upside down. Unable to stand the isolation any longer, Kate breaks the rules when she heads out for a walk in the nearby hills. When she doesn’t return, Matt raises the alarm and the search begins.

The way the storyline flowed, together with the way she captured the thoughts of the characters as they struggled with their isolation and fears, made for a excellent read and one that I’m sure many can relate to. Set in the Peak District, with wonderful descriptive text of the ruggedness and beauty of the countryside.

Highly recommend.

Many thanks to Sarah Moss, Picador Books and NetGalley for the review copy.

Like Moss’s previous book, Summerwater, The Fell takes place over a single day. The book blurb gives the basic set up, so it isn’t a spoiler to say that Kate and her son are self-isolating (during the UK’s November 2020 lockdown, I think) and it all gets too much for Kate who decides to go for a walk, which is technically illegal, but she isn’t going to see anyone so it can’t do any harm, right? Matt is her son who shares a house with her and suddenly realises she isn’t there any longer. Alice is their next door neighbour. These are three of the main characters in the book. The other is Rob who is there on the first page and is part of the mountain rescue team that the book blurb perhaps unhelpfully tells us about. I think I might have wanted to discover the basic plot line of the book for myself, but I guess it might be that the focus of the book is very much not the plot but more the reactions and emotions of these four characters as the plot unfolds.

The narrative moves from one main character to another in a series of almost “stream of consciousness” chapters where we listen in to the thoughts of that chapter’s character. The voices of each character are clearly distinct and you can open the book at random and know from the style exactly whose thoughts you are listening to on that page.

This is a COVID book and it does an excellent job of capturing a time and a place. Anyone who lived in England during the November 2020 lockdown will recognise the setting with people’s movements limited, fines for going out when you shouldn’t, fears about picking up COVID from your grocery delivery, the NHS making priority calls about who to help that are necessarily short term and might have long term consequences for the nation’s mental health as well as physical etc.. In many ways, the book feels like a time capsule that has recorded that period and allows us now to look back on it. Although I am not 100% sure why we would want to do that as it really wasn’t a lot of fun.

My favourite character in the book is Alice and I found her chapter the most engaging (despite the drama experienced by Kate). Alice’s chapters really capture well what it felt like to be in lockdown. The weakest chapters for me were those voiced by Matt, although his central dilemma about whether to call for help because that would draw attention to the fact that his mother had broken the law and might mean they lose the house or are separated as a family unit was, for me, the highlight of the book. Kate’s and Rob’s chapters are interesting for Kate’s imagined conversation with a raven and for Rob’s internal battle where rescuing people contends with family responsibilities.

I recently read Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat. Where Moss has written a book based on COVID, Hall wrote a book inspired by COVID. And I think different people will react in different ways to the two different approaches. For some, what Moss has done here will capture a time and a place brilliantly and be an effective way to engaged with the pandemic. Others, including me, will respond better to Hall’s imaginative abstraction of COVID. That said, this is probably my favourite of the three Sarah Moss novels I have read (the other two being Ghost Wall and Summerwater). They are all good books but this one just has the edge for me.