Her style is concise. The Fell, like its two predecessors, is elegantly brief ... The novel slips gracefully between Kate’s perspective on the fell, her teenage son Matt’s increasing anxiety as he waits for her at home, their neighbour Alice, and Rob, a member of the mountain rescue team. The greater tension here comes from the question of Kate’s survival—Moss can create drama from the effort to eat a fig roll—but all four characters reveal their own night thoughts as they worry in their various ways about Kate ... The astonishing thing is that Moss can write so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist’s can be.

... absorbing ... The extended passage of stream-of-consciousness internal monologue...is subtly, ingeniously done ... there's a relentless, intoxicating flow to much of the writing, with ideas constantly spawning new ideas in a process of perpetual intellectual motion. That said, the writing still feels precision-tooled, the words carefully-chosen and the details equally carefully thought-through ... If and when the dust finally settles on the covid era, a handful of the many books it has inspired will eventually solidify into a sort of pandemic canon. It's perhaps not the kind of accolade that authors dream of, but this humane, thoughtful reflection on the experience of the last 18 months surely merits a place on any such list.

Even the prose has been forcibly domesticated. Though the characters think in long, associative, run-on sentences, there is little of the wild, supple unpredictability for which stream of consciousness was invented. It’s more like anxious small talk, in which the chatterer, though theoretically freed from the civilizing influence of other people, compulsively censors and corrects herself ... Moss is concerned, here and elsewhere, with our responsibilities to one another, and with our interconnectedness—across geographical distance and historical time, across species and national borders. Yet my imagination fails me when I try to envision what The Fell, published last year in Britain, might signify to U.S. readers. I can think of no book I’ve read since moving to New York from England that has made me feel so foreign ... Each character at some point fears that Kate, missing on the Peaks, will die or come to serious harm, and yet for all of them—Kate herself included—the threat of social sanction, that 'the whole village will know' she broke the rules, feels more frightening. In that sense, viewed as a study in repression and displacement, Moss’s defiantly uneventful novel becomes a psychological thriller.

With Moss’s trademark attention to both the beauty and danger of the natural world, the moors come alive as almost another character ... Covering only a few hours, The Fell conveys not only Kate’s and Matt’s fears but the particular anxieties of the time: the precautions about touching surfaces, the financial stress of furlough, and the dread of denunciation by neighbours ... The book also captures what was lost—from missed celebrations to more everyday delights ... The Fell is a slim book covering a lot of ground. In unfussy prose, Moss seamlessly blends quotidian concerns ... For Moss, the idea of control over one’s life is itself a sign of privilege.

It is almost too close to the bone, but it is a neat examination of humanity in crisis ... Rob...is beautifully and humanely drawn, an example of what Moss does so well, picking out ordinary characters in a crowd ... Moss is also excellent at skewering the cruel face of humanity ... The Fell has a lot to say about the part that Covid had to play in reminding many of us of our own mortality and proximity to death. This is a subject that Moss handles sensitively but unstintingly ... The characters she chooses are easy to empathise with, their little lives mirroring our own with their small hardships that can dominate existence and seem overwhelming.

These four characters narrate the book in individual sections full of extremely personal perspectives. They rarely appear in the same scenes, narrating only through their internal monologues. The intense separation between the characters reinforces the novel's major theme of isolation. Perhaps the most significant dialogue in the book is when Kate, lying injured along the path through the moors, hallucinates a judgmental raven who voices both Kate's suffering and her yearning for freedom ... Moss' short novel crystalizes our shared moment of global danger and allows us to observe its different facets. The book's ending, sadly, is not completely satisfying: After their traumatic experiences on the moors, the main characters don't experience personal transformations or have new insights. Perhaps, though, this limitation is exactly what Moss is trying to say: that the continuing pandemic, combined with the climate crisis, has stripped us of any hope for resolution.

... she conjures the fretful confinement of the pandemic with colossal skill. I was amazed at how much of the texture and trivial annoyances of lockdown I’d blocked out, but reading The Fell, it all comes rushing back—practically every sentence needs a trigger warning ... Yet no matter how deft and evocative Moss’s prose is, there is no getting around the fact the book forces us to relive some of the worst days of our lives. Is it good enough to justify this? Not quite. There is plenty to admire. I feared a book about lockdown would be boring, but the operation to rescue Kate is nail-biting. There are also scenes of unbearable poignancy ... Even so, the characterisation is patchy ... The ending is slightly underwhelming and the characters and their preoccupations are such a familiar take on the past year that they border on cliché. Moss captures the experience of living through lockdown, but doesn’t much move the conversation on. What we are left with is a time capsule that is both uncomfortably accurate and a bit stale.

... the suspenseful organising drama...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. 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. All of the characters share a certain doomy drollness ... There is an abundance of generosity, too ... With its unwavering interiority and meticulously excavated disquiet, The Fell is a novel certain to be seized upon by scholars in the future. But what of readers in 2021? Lacking the dystopian romance of Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat, say, or the glamour and verve of Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends...The Fell is almost too faithful an artefact. For the time being, many readers, such as Moss’s own Alice, may prefer to reach for a dog-eared Lord Peter Wimsey than this intense time capsule of a tale.

This is a short novel but it is not compressed: there is little plot and so the pages are filled with descriptions of the quotidian—laundry, gardening, looking through the fridge, baking—and with characters’ critical opinions of other people and the way they have made the world ... Kate is sympathetic in her resistance, but her anger is expressed repetitively...to the point where readers will feel like they are on the receiving end of a monologue from someone who doesn’t often get the chance to speak to other people. Which may be mimetic but isn’t entertaining ... when Alice’s boorish daughter—during an excruciating and funny Zoom dinner—threatens to ring the police, there is a strong sense of character flattening in order for the sensible point of view to wipe its feet on an absurd opinion. The solution is the disaster plot, which can’t help but be sentimental and simplifying ... The whole novel feels rushed, the waste of the talent of a novelist whose style, like all novelists, is more interesting than her opinions.

The Fell is so attuned to the banalities and anxieties of lockdown that one is tempted to argue, as many critics have done, that the novel belongs to future readers, like a literary time capsule. The notion is intriguing, but it raises questions about what pandemic fiction might, or should, do that other archival material cannot; questions about the relationship between the real and revelatory. Certainly, Moss’s novel captures the listlessness and erosive interiority of lockdown. But it does little to enhance our understanding of these fraught years. With its descriptions of stress baking, decluttering and its mild-mannered grumbles about social distancing, The Fell feels less urgent and immersive than tired ... Saturated in gothic menace, the tale of Kate’s hiking misadventure feels like an evasion: a solvable problem to distract us from the broader terrors of disease and civic and environmental disintegration.

It seems like one of those distanced dramas staged on Zoom: a four-hander, whose long passages of free-indirect discourse feel like monologue or soliloquy. Integrating word choice with subject and genre was once called the problem of ‘decorum’, and a certain verbal restraint holds here as well ... A touch of the fantastic does enter The Fell ... It’s the sole magical note in a novel that otherwise feels schematically conceived. After all, is this not the told and told again story of the past 18 months: a quarantined nation, someone in need and the emergency services coming to help them? In this case, it’s a broken leg and mountain rescue, not a breathless pensioner in hospital. Someone will write that other book eventually. For now though it’s all too recent, too pungently fresh in the mind.

Sarah Moss’s short, suspenseful novel The Fell is a claustrophobic snapshot of winter 2020 ... Moss’s prose is impressive. The real-time commentary of one day told from four perspectives has such momentum that the book is difficult to put down ... She deftly weaves a story so compelling that you’ll be disappointed to get to the final page ... The novel touches on social responsibility, kindness, and loneliness and makes you ponder your own feelings towards someone who broke the rules to save their sanity.

... [an] expertly woven narrative skein ... 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. These interlinked narratives evoking Britain’s lockdown-altered reality are a triumph of economy and insight.