The Fell

A mom in the English countryside breaks her quarantine and things get out of hand in this riveting novel by the award-winning author of Ghost Wall and Summerwater.

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

“A slim, tense page-turner . . . I gulped down The Fell in one sitting.” —Emma Donoghue, author of The Pull of the Stars

At dusk on a November evening in 2020, a woman slips through her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period, a true lockdown, but she can't take it anymore—the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know she’s stepped out.

Kate planned only a quick walk—a stretch of the legs, a breath of fresh air—on paths she knows too well. But somehow she falls. Injured, unable to move, she sees that her short, furtive stroll will become a mountain rescue operation, maybe even a missing person case . . .

Sarah Moss's The Fell is a story of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and compassion. Suspenseful, witty, and wise, it asks probing questions about how close so many live to the edge and about who we are in the world, who we are to our neighbors, and who we become when the world demands we shut ourselves away.

“A study in repression and displacement, Moss’s defiantly uneventful novel [is] a psychological thriller.” ―Lidija Haas, The New York Times Book Review

“A deft mixture of mounting dread, metaphysical angst and doomy drollness.” —The Guardian (UK)