Lost in the fog: The Fell, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

Novelists are leery about letting the buzzwords of recent history into their books. The immediate past threatens to upstage the imagined world with its reality, and at the same time diminish it with the cardboard tang of everyday life. Sarah Moss, by contrast, has never been embarrassed to lend her prose the texture of contemporary conversation. As a celebrated author of novels in which catastrophe shatters middle-class English lives, she was always a likely candidate to be quick off the mark with a lockdown novel.

In her latest, it’s November 2020, as night falls in the Peak District. Kate, a single mum, is half way through a 14-day period of mandatory isolation when she decides to slip out for an illegal walk in the hills. Her son remains behind; her widowed neighbour, Alice, sees her going up the path. The book opens with Rob, a volunteer for Mountain Rescue, getting word that a woman’s gone out on the fell and hasn’t come back.