Lockdown-busting walk into the Peak District

On a November evening in 2020 at dusk a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week quarantine period, but she just can’t take it any more – the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. The Moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know.

But Kate’s neighbour Alice sees her leaving and Matt, Kate’s son, soon realises she’s missing. And Kate who planned only a quick solitary walk – a breath of open air- falls and badly injures herself. What began as a furtive walk has turned into a mountain rescue operation.

The Fell asks probing questions about the place the world has become since March 2020, and the place it was before. The Fell is a story about compassion and kindness and what we must do to survive, and it will move you to tears.

The Fell, during the Covid, when a lockdown-busting expedition into the Peak District in October 2020, goes badly wrong in Sarah Moss’s tale of a society under strain.

The plot where Kate and her son Matt live on the edges of Peak District. One afternoon, as it is getting dark, she goes on an illegal hike to alleviate the suicidal urges brought on by having to isolate under lockdown. Suddenly she has a bad accident and a rescue party must be sent to look for her, with her life very much in danger. We switch between her increasingly pained attempts at survival and her son’s frantic worry, while privy to the thoughts of her retired neighbour Alice, who lives alone, and to Rob, a rescue volunteer who goes to look for Kate.

According to Moss, People are more scared of other people than the virus. This isolated place is shown to us as pure Middle England, where everyone is worried about doing something that will provoke someone else’s disapproval. The little plot with descriptions of the quotidian – laundry, gardening, looking through the fridge, baking and with character’s critical opinions of other people and the way they have made the world. Kate who works in a café and sings with both taken away, the struggles to survive economically and spiritually on furlough. The idea of Kate as a law breaker, by going out for a solitary walk in an unpopulated area, when Alice’s boorish daughter threatens to ring the police.

The Fell by Sarah Moss, Picador £14.99, 192 pages.