At the beginning of the first lockdown, I said I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable glut of literary fiction reflecting on isolation during the pandemic. Of course, this was before I knew that one of the first novels to be published with a lockdown setting would be The Fell by Sarah Moss. Rather than the bewildering novelty of spring 2020, it is set during the second lockdown in the UK in the following November, at the point where social distancing fatigue had well and truly set in along with anxiety about the winter ahead. Kate, a single mother in her forties, is a waitress on furlough in the Peak District. After ten days of self-isolating with her son Matt, she finally snaps and sets out for a walk which has unintended consequences. ‘The Fell’ is very much in the same vein as Moss’s two previous short novels Ghost Wall and Summerwater which dealt with the fallout of the Brexit referendum with an acute sense of dread. Her state-of-the-nation analysis is both dense and astutely portrayed in less than 200 pages, depicting the sort of conversations we’ve all had about practical matters like hygiene and more philosophical ones about personal responsibility. Some readers may find it’s still too soon to immerse themselves in realist depictions of life during a pandemic, but Moss made a good point when she said in an interview recently: “I’m still slightly puzzled (by the idea that) a pandemic should be put away to a mature like a Christmas pudding, and don’t know quite who decides when it’s ready. We need stories, we need narratives… that’s how we’ll begin to navigate this and to be able to think about it other than as an emergency”. Many thanks to Picador for sending me a review copy via NetGalley