THE FELL
holding the reader’s head and daring them to look away from the social problems she brings to light. This might be a deeply disconcerting novel, but it’s also a brave one. A fever dream that’s as hard to read as it is brilliant.
Moss, Sarah Farrar, Straus and Giroux (192 pp.) $25.00 | March 1, 2022 978-0-3746-0604-6
SAY HER NAME
At the height of the pandemic lockdown, an experienced hill walker fails to return from an evening hike—then a prohibited activity—in her beloved Peak District in northern England. As her teenage son and elderly neighbor wait anxiously for bad news, a rescue party combs the treacherous moors. As lockdown restrictions confine most people to their homes, Kate—a divorced 40-year-old single mother—wonders, “When did we become a species whose default state is shut up indoors?...We’re a living experiment, she thinks, in the intensive farming of humans, [though] it’s all in the name of safety, not profit.” This thought arises as she sets out for an illicit walk from her house up to the wild hills known as the fell. She leaves her 16-year-old son, Matt, and her phone behind, thinking that she won’t be gone long, but takes her well-equipped backpack, because even this somewhat distracted woman knows how unpredictable her native terrain and weather can be. Meanwhile, Alice, Kate’s elderly neighbor, is enduring not only lockdown isolation, but also the memory of a recent bout with cancer and the possibility that it’s returning—and, what’s more, the vital but nonetheless irksome kindness of neighbors and family. “There’s a limit to how grateful you want to be, how helpless you want to feel, and she passed it a while ago. I was a whole person, she wants to say, I worked my way up, managed a team and a budget.” Matt, by contrast, is the voice of youth here, home alone and afraid for his mother’s safety. The fourth voice in this expertly woven narrative skein is that of Rob, the divorced father of a petulant teenage daughter and a patient man who—once Kate disappears—will search the hills all night as he and the other members of his rescue squad have done so many times before. In a familiar routine, they “clip on their radios, turn on the head torches, heft the rucksacks and set off up the track. Raindrops fall like sparks in the torchlight.” 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 lockdownaltered reality are a triumph of economy and insight.
Mitchell, Dreda Say & Ryan Carter Thomas & Mercer (316 pp.) $11.99 paper | April 1, 2022 978-1-5420-2968-1 A biracial London physician was brought up by a Black adoptive family; her search for her roots plunges her into a series of revelations that hit her like slaps in the face. The death of her beloved adoptive Mummy Cherry changes everything for respiratory specialist Dr. Eva Harris. Already suspended since a patient filed a lawsuit against her hospital after Eva, exhausted by caring for Cherry, nearly gave him a fatal overdose of drugs, she lashes out at her adoptive father, retired Metropolitan Police detective Carlton “Sugar” McNeil, when she becomes convinced he’s taken up with Ronnie, his housekeeper. And she resolves to track down the birth mother who gave her up as an infant. Her search is unexpectedly accelerated when the company to whom she sends a DNA sample puts her in touch with retired White businessman Danny Greene, who claims he’s her biological father and says he’d love to meet her. The meeting, which includes Danny’s White daughter Miriam, is at best a mixed success. But Eva, feeling her husband, White accountant Joe Harris, slipping away from her, is so hungry for family that she meets with Danny again and even tries to mend fences with Sugar. Uneasy about a disagreement she overhears between her adoptive father and police Cmdr. John Dixon about the Met’s reluctance to commit more resources to an ancient missing person case, Eva focuses more and more intently on the very different responses to the well-publicized disappearance of blond young Poppy Munro in 1994 and the virtually unacknowledged vanishing of four Black women that same year. The solution, less surprising than depressing, confirms Eva’s darkest fears about the low value assigned women of color by the Met in particular and contemporary Britain in general. A strong dose for readers interested in watching racial prejudices play out at every possible opportunity.
24
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15 january 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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