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People primarily feeling sorry about themselves, or if not overtly that, then minutely describing what causes them inconvenience or self doubt. This first longer fiction I read about COVID-19 disappointed me.
�� you can’t sign out of community and it’s not that she’d usually want to.

The Fell, with its one day in a pandemic focus, felt rather pedestrian and depressing. Kate, a furloughed single mom, is the main character and her quarantine breaking towards the hills behind her English village home goes very awry. Her teenage son Matt is game addicted, a recreational drugs user and in general bored. Then we have a bit better of elderly neighbour who very much fears the virus due to her recovering from cancer.

Despite Sarah Moss writing competently a lot of the book is characters musing on how the pandemic impacts them, what they can't do, worries nothing will ever be the same and reflecting on the overwhelming urge to do things they now can't.
You’ll be lucky to live to regret this is something a fantasy raven tells a character somewhere and I do agree, the characters all show a rather deep lack of self reflective tendencies and what a boon it is to live in a relatively rich country during a global pandemic. The feeling of unrest and discomfort is well captured but in the end just felt oppressive and whiny in a sense.

Life, then, to be lived, somehow is something thought at the end of the book, and again that is such a truth it is hard to disagree with. But I felt it, and the story covered in The Fell, is just not enough to satisfy me as a reader.