Is it too soon to write novels about the pandemic? Nearly two years have passed since we started to hear reports of a mysterious virus in China, a virus that has now taken more than 5 million lives around the globe. As I write, the world is still in the grip of COVID-19. Just yesterday 4,600 people died. Do we need to wait until its full horror is behind us to properly reflect on what this meant for us? Sarah Moss, a storyteller I’ve discovered quite recently and admire greatly, doesn’t think so. The Fell is set in a small English village at the time of the most stringent lock-down. Kate, a single mother, furloughed from her job, no longer able to sing in her local folk group, is growing increasingly cabin-fevered, stuck inside day after day with her teenage son. One evening, unable to bear it a moment longer, she heads out on to her beloved fells for a quick walk. Surely no one can object to that. Surely no harm can come of it …

Presented as a sequence of interior monologues (Kate’s, her son’s, their neighbor’s), The Fell records the simple and difficult confrontations – with mortality, with meaning, with life itself – that the pandemic has provoked and focused in all of us lucky enough not to have been struck down by it. There will be much more to say about these terrible times in the years ahead, but for now Moss has captured with simple directness and poignancy one moment in one life in a time none of us will ever forget.

Prize-winning novelists aren’t always great storytellers. With little effort I can think of several, many of them garlanded with the most prestigious awards, who don’t even seem to care very much about the business of crafting a compelling story. However strange that might seem, it’s a topic for a different day because my short post today is a small celebration of a writer who tells wonderful stories and who, along the way, has attracted more awards than most. Colson Whitehead is perhaps best known for The Underground Railroad, though The Nickel Boys was my introduction to his work. That harrowing story stayed with me long after I turned the final page, so I’ve been eager to see what he would do next.

Harlem Shuffle is a much less grim book than its immediate predecessor and seems to have been crafted more explicitly as entertainment. I’m in no way suggesting that it’s light or trivial. Far from it. In fact, the story it tells of one man’s attempt to pull himself free of an upbringing marked by poverty and neglect and to create a stable and conventional family life is an important and moving one. But the serious intent has an entertaining wrapper, a caper set in Harlem in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Whitehead has range. There’s no doubt about that. And he writes here with real tenderness, affection, and humor. But Harlem Shuffle isn’t perfect. The problem for me was the central character, Ray Carney – the good man trying hard, but not always hard enough, to live the straight, law abiding life. For me he never rose off the page as a fully formed person, and that ultimately made the difference between what could have been a great novel and what proved to be an enjoyable story.