<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Wall-Sarah-Moss/dp/1783784458/">2018/49: <i>Ghost Wall</i> -- Sarah Moss</a>
<blockquote>... a ghost wall, said the Prof, sitting back on his haunches. I was just telling your dad, it’s what one of the local tribes tried as a last-ditch defence against the Romans, they made a palisade and brought out their ancestral skulls and arrayed them along the top, dead faces gazing down, it was their strongest magic. [loc. 946]</blockquote>

Silvie (short for Sulevia, Ancient British goddess of springs and pools) is a young seventeen. Her father, Bill, is a bus driver with an avid interest in archaeology: he, Silvie's mother Alison and Silvie have been invited to join Professor Slade ('call me Jim') and a trio of students (Dan, Pete and Molly) in an 'experimental archaeology' camp somewhere in Northumbria.  Jim's interest is scholarly: Bill, on the other hand, would apparently like nothing more than to go back to those simpler, more honest times, free of immigrants and womens' rights and inequality. He is an emotionally and physically abusive husband and father, holding his wife wholly in thrall, and Silvie in a toxic bond of love and fear. Silvie is good at going away inside her head, but even there she doesn't escape her father's dominance. 

Molly and Silvie become friends, and bond over forbidden trips to the nearest shop (why, yes, they are both wearing 'Iron Age' tunics and moccasins: but ice cream!) despite the issues of class and privilege that might divide them. Meanwhile, the men -- 'they’re not much interested in the foraging and cooking, they just want to kill things and talk about fighting' -- are talking about the ghost wall, the bog burials, the sacrifices, the liminal zone between life and death, and the rituals and curses by which the Iron Age folk protected themselves. But what about the victims? (The book opens with a short description, third person, of one such woman.) Silvie, at least, understands that you don't sacrifice something you don't love. 

This is a very short novel, but quite chilling. A surprising amount of unease stems from the increasing friction (never discussed, of course) between the six members of the group. But there is also the constant presence of the <u>idea</u> of sacrifice, of the dead watching the living: the idea that the dead are not gone. "They had to be pinned to their graves with sharp sticks driven through elbow and knee, trapped behind woven wooden palings, to stop them coming back, creeping home dead and not dead in the dark." [loc. 912]

Moss' prose is poetic, and she's good at layering sensory impressions and simple words to build up ambience. I wasn't wholly comfortable with the way that dialogue and first-person thoughts were blended -- no speech marks, a great many run-on sentences -- but I think this technique did make the novel more immersive. 

I'd add a trigger warning for domestic violence and child abuse: I don't know if the latter has any sexual element, and the lack of clarity on that point bothers me somewhat.

Thanks to <a href="https://www.netgalley.co.uk/">NetGalley</a> for providing a free advance review copy in exchange for this honest review!

This short, dark novel is set about 25 years ago. It addresses topics that are relevant today and must have been relevant since before the Iron Age times that the novel's characters are attempting to recreate. It doesn't always make for pleasant reading but it is compelling reading, with some beautiful descriptions of landscape.

The characters are well developed, a mix of middle-class academics from southern England and a northern working-class couple with their daughter. But "Ghost Wall" is about more than the obvious regional, class and gender differences, it is about how these differences have an impact on individuals' behaviours and on the group dynamic. It raises issues of physical and psychological domestic violence, misogyny of modern young male adults, and of extreme ethnocentricity. The author demonstrates how a person's perception of their social and intellectual inferiority and inadequacy, and their compulsion to control other people and events can turn them into a bully or worse. More positively, she also shows how a strong moral compass, empathy and solidarity can perhaps help change this culture.

I read this book quickly as I was totally gripped by the plot and characterisation. I am looking forward to a more measured re-read before too long.

Many thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for giving me a copy of "Ghost Wall" in exchange for this honest review.

A taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior.


Silvie and her family are living in a recreation of the iron age led by her domineering father. It's an extremely well-known written, subtle, uncomfortable read as it slowly dawn's on the reader where the story might be headed.

This is a stunning beautiful and evocative novel about land, heritage and history that manages to question both what country and what self means to us. Deft characterisation and poetic prose mean that this short, but striking novel is unforgettable.

‘’Darkness was a long time coming.’’

This book is my first contact with Sarah Moss’s writing and it proved to be so fascinating...The word Ghost in the title, the bogs and Northumberland drew my attention to a novel that I read in a single sitting. It was mystifying, hypnotic, complex, powerful.

It is an unusually hot summer in Northumberland. Silvie and her parents are following a professor and his students in a camp that tries to imitate the daily life during the Iron Age. However, things start going wrong and the camp becomes a field for repressed feeling and the need for justice. Silvie is at the heart of this peculiar, dark storm.

‘’The shadows were long in the grass, the whole moorland low and still in slanting yellow light. In the east the trees stood dark against the sky and all the colours were fading. A late flight of birds winged the air, homeward bound.’’

The writing is extremely beautiful, difficult, demanding as the story is told in long sentences, a technique that makes the atmosphere even more threatening, almost ruthless. At certain times, reading felt painful. Moss uses the richness of the history in the area to create a mystical scenery. Hadrian’s Wall, the wild nature, the ravens coaxing a shadowy future and, above all, the bogs and the sacrificed souls that found an untimely, tragic death in an era of darkness.

Darkness and ignorance are two central themes in the story because Moss focuses in the way Silvie’s father, Bill, uses History to justify and express his cruelty and violence over his family, his desire to control everything and everyone. Ignorance in the form of all the prejudices against the people from the North, their accent and mentality. On a more positive note, Moss includes a brief reference to Berlin (...wait for me, you beautiful city, I’ll see you next August! ) and the fall of the Berlin Wall, another vile creation of the human race that so loves to divide and sacrifice, and much less to unite and create.

Silvie is a ray of light in the bleakness and pain of the story. Her name is supposedly a diminutive of Sulevia, a goddess of springs and woods. A name chosen by Bill who fails to notice (obviously…) that the origin of the name is extremely Roman. So, Bill is actually the epitome of the culturally illiterate man who wants to appropriate History so that it fits his claims. It is sad to say that this is the least of his faults. He is a horrible, extremist brute. Violent, hideous, trapped in his incompetence and illusions like all extremists. There is no love for his wife and his daughter. Only a twisted obsession to imitate a life that will allow him to freely express his instincts. He is one of the most despicable characters you'll ever come across. Silvie’s mother is equally at fault here, She cannot be acquitted because of her condition. She is weak, pathetically giving way under his psychological and physical violence, unable to protect her child who should have been her only priority. I had no tolerance reserved for her. Not when we have Silvie and Molly, the young women, the fighters and protectors.

With a thoroughly satisfying conclusion, this is a haunting story about the bonds of the present and the past, about the cruelty towards the ones who are not allowed to defend themselves, the resistance of youth against violence and tyranny, the need to end patriarchy once and for all. A story that demonstrates the evils brought about by prejudice, extremism, and racism. What could be more relevant to our troubled times?

Many thanks to Granta Books and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

'We’re seeing if we can make a ghost wall, said the Prof, sitting back on his haunches. I was just telling your dad, it’s what one of the local tribes tried as a last-ditch defence against the Romans, they made a palisade and brought out their ancestral skulls and arrayed them along the top, dead faces gazing down, it was their strongest magic.'

Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall sparked connections for me with two excellent novels - Melissa Harrison's recent All Among the Barley (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2470923948) and Paul Kingsnorth's highly innovative, and Goldsmiths shortlisted, 20145 novel, The Wake (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2470923948).

Harrison's novel, set in rural Suffolk in the 1930s, features a fictional Order of English Yeomanry, based on real-life groups that were common at the time, with a back-to-nature English nationalism that strayed easily into support for fascism.  As Harrison explains in an afterword:

"These complex, fragmented groups differed from one another, sometimes slightly, sometimes profoundly; but all drew from a murky broth of nationalism, anti-Semitism, nativism, protectionism, anti-immigration sentiment, economic autarky, secessionism, militarism, anti-Europeanism, rural revivalism, nature worship, organicism, landscape mysticism and distrust of big business – particularly international finance."

Kingsnorth's novel is set in 11th century England, and the 'hero' of his novel, the narrator buccmaster is part of the Anglo-Saxon "resistance" in the wake of 1066 and the Norman conquest.   But the buccmaster's views, and his quest to preserve authentic Englishness, rather stray again into xenophobic nativism.  Interestingly in this novel, while Kingsnorth presents buccmaster warts-and-all, for example he is clearly a coward as well as delusional as to his own importance, one strongly suspects the author's sympathy lies with his views.  Kingsnorth has caused significant controversy recently for his eco-nativist views that have strayed into supporting Brexit and, while not supporting certainly at least understanding other disruptive politicians of the left and right (Putin, Trump etc).

This article of his own in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/18/the-new-lie-of-the-land-what-future-for-environmentalism-in-the-age-of-trump) contained the troubling passage: 

'It must be 20 years since I read the autobiography of the late travel writer Norman Lewis, The World, The World, but the last sentence stays with me. Wandering the hills of India, Lewis is ask by a puzzled local why he spends his life travelling instead of staying at home. What is he looking for? “I am looking for the people who have always been there,” replies Lewis, “and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.”'

This rather ridiculous concept of 'a people who have always been there' was part of Sarah Moss's motivation for writing Ghost Wall.    She explains in detail here (http://www.sarahmoss.org/on-prehistorical-fictions/) but she nails the story of 'foundation myths' as she calls them in this paragraph, including exposing buccmaster's folly:

'Foundation myths live in prehistory, back just before the inconvenient truths of the historical record, and foundation myths feel very relevant at the moment. I live in a country where xenophobia and nativism have become normal in the last couple of years, where the rights of people perceived not to be British, or not British enough, are routinely denied.

In this story, the country was better before the immigrants came, when all the inhabitants were native British. When, I wonder, was that? Before the Windrush? Before the Empire brought people from India and Ireland and parts of Africa to live and work in Britain in the nineteenth century? Before the transatlantic slave trade? Before William and Mary came from Holland to rule us? Maybe before the Norman Conquest, before all those French people brought wine and made us stop speaking Anglo-Saxon? No, because the Angles and the Saxons came from the Nordic countries via France (Saxony, in fact). Before the Anglo-Saxons we had the Romans, bringing underfloor heating and literacy but definitely not British and not even, actually, very Roman; there were Syrian and German troops in Yorkshire and Northumberland two thousand years ago, coming over here and making the roads run straight. And writing things down: there were runes and bits of script before the Roman conquest of Britain but our historical record begins with the arrival of those foreign troops. The ‘Britons’ who experienced that invasion had come, a few generations earlier, from Ireland and Brittany (Britain is named after part of France), their material culture distinctively Celtic. There were people in these islands before the Celts came, and they left some stones and bone fragments, just enough for us to know that they, too, came from elsewhere.  Go back far enough and we all came out of Africa, or Eden if you prefer a foundation myth to archaeology. Either way, according to the logic of national blood, none of us belong on these islands.'

As for the novel itself, Ghost Wall actually tells a relatively simple story, indeed at 160 pages it feels more like a novella than a novel, and indeed one suspects could have been slimmed down further to a 50-60 page story was the form more commercially viable in the UK.

It is narrated by Silvie, a 17 year old girl.   She is in Northumberland with her father, a bus driver by profession but amateur historian, and her mother.   The three have joined a University professor, and three students from his 'Experiental Archaeology course.  And yes that does read Experiental, not Experimental: the group are camping in the Northumberland national park, with its extensive peat bogs, reconstructing, as best they can, iron-age life.

'That was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our reenactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.'

The teenage Silvie, in her narration, rather pokes fun at the inauthenticity of some of the reconstruction, although any comments are made sotto voce for fear of upsetting her father, who takes the whole thing very seriously: 

'When I woke up there was light seeping around the sheepskin hanging over the door. They probably didn’t actually have sheep, the Professor had said, but since we weren’t allowed to kill animals using Iron Age technologies we would have to take what we could get and sheepskins are a lot easier to pick up on the open market than deerskins. While I was glad we weren’t going to be hacking the guts out of deer in the woods with flint blades, I thought the Professor’s dodging of bloodshed pretty thoroughly messed up the idea that our experiences that summer were going to rediscover the lifeways of pre-modern hunter gatherers. The clue, I muttered, is in the name, you know, hunter gatherers? 

What was that, Silvie, said Dad, would you like to repeat what you just said to Professor Slade? 

Oh, please, call me Jim, said Professor Slade, and don’t worry, I have teenagers myself, I know what it’s like. 

Yeah, I’d thought, but your teenagers aren’t here, are they, gone off somewhere nice with their mum I don’t doubt, France or Italy probably.'
 
Although Sil defends her father when the rather cynical students joke about his views, for example her name, a 'proper British name' according to her father.

'Silvie, what, short for Sylvia? 

Sulevia, I said. I was about to say, as I had been doing since I first started school, she was an Ancient British goddess, my dad chose it, but they were already exchanging glances. 

Sulevia’s a local deity, said Dan, Jim was talking about her the other day. Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools, co-opted by the Romans, said Molly.
...
A proper British name. What’s he mean by that, then? 

Nothing, I said, he likes British prehistory, he thought it was a shame the old names had gone. 

Right, said Pete, you mean he likes the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere, that if he goes back far enough he’ll find someone who wasn’t a foreigner. You know it’s not really British, right? I mean, Sulevia, it’s obviously just a version of Sylvia which means – of the woods in Latin.

I said, yes, I do know, a Roman corruption of a lost British word.'

But more troubling aspects start to emerge.  A description of seeing her mother when she returns to the camp from a foraging trip contains within it, the casual but disturbing 'There was a new bruise on her arm.'.   And as she walks along Hadrian's Wall, her own thoughts of the many diffuse voices that would have been present among the Roman forces (echoing the author's blog above) cross into thoughts of her father's nativism:

'I half closed my eyes, imagined hearing on the wind the Arabic conversations of the Syrian soldiers who’d dug the ditches and hoisted the stones two thousand years ago. I tried to hold the view in my mind and strip the landscape of pylons and church towers, to see through the eyes of the patrolling legion fresh from the Black Forest. They weren’t even really Roman, Dad had said, they were from all over the show, North Africa and Eastern Europe and Germany, probably a lot of them didn’t even speak proper Latin. There were even Negroes, imagine what the Britons made of that, they’d never have seen the like. We were only two days out from Newcastle, a city that had upset Dad, and I knew better than to challenge him; even the word ‘Negro’was already some concession to my ideas because he preferred to use a more offensive term and wait, chin raised, for a reaction.'

As her father and the professor and the two male students get increasingly enthusiastic, they decide to reconstruct the ghost wall of the title, and my opening quote, albeit using rabbit skulls rather than their own dead.  The female student Molly points out the 'boys with toys' aspect:

'I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, said Molly, it kind of reminds me of Swallows and Amazons but they’re grown men. Those little drums and a willow fence with rabbits’heads on top, for what, to keep out the Romans?'

While Professor Slade and her father argue about whether the ghost wall would have had any effect on Roman troops, her father arguing that the ancient Britains 'saw off' the Romans, and the Professor that Hadrian's wall was more of a 'Rome woz here' monument than anything defensive:

'It would just have been intertribal squabbles up here, the Prof was saying, until the Romans came, no training at all for taking on the imperial army, they’d never have seen the like. At least part of their defence was magic, did you know that? War trumpets, scary noises coming at you over the marsh. Aye, said Dad, maybe so, you’re thinking of the carnyxes, but they had their horses and swords as well, didn’t they, put up quite a fight and after all sent them packing in the end, there weren’t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there? 
...
Well, said the Prof, they weren’t exactly British, as I said before, they wouldn’t have seen themselves that way, as far as we can tell their identities were tribal. Celts, we tend to call them these days though they wouldn’t have recognized the idea, they seem to have come from Brittany and Ireland, from the West. Dad didn’t like this line. Celts, I suppose, sounded Irish, and even though Jesus had only recently died at the time in question Dad didn’t like the Irish, tended to see Catholicism in much the same light as the earlier form of Roman imperialism . Foreigners coming over here, telling us what to think. He wanted his own ancestry , wanted a lineage, a claim on something. Not people from Ireland or Rome or Germania or Syria but some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.'

Except from Swallows and Amazons, it instead all gets a bit Lord of the Flies at the end as the men decide to re-enact another of the ancient Briton's rites, one inspired by the bog bodies found in the local peat, including Lindow Man, which she and her father saw at the Manchester Museum.

Overall: the theme of the novel is very important, and as mentioned links with one in two of my favourite British novels of the last 5 years.   

As mentioned, the story itself is perhaps a little insubstantial for a novel, albeit Moss packs a lot in there including themes my review doesn't even touch on (misogyny, some snobbery from the Southern English students and professor to Silvie's Northern family, her own emerging and confused sexuality).

But as a negative,  where Kingnorth was not afraid to show us the flaws in his protagonist despite sharing his views, Moss doesn't do Sil's father the courtesy of giving him any real redeeming features: in particular his temper-triggered domestic abuse seemed an unnecessary addition to his faults.

But still a stimulating and quick - perhaps too quick - read.  3.5 stars.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

I've never read anything by Sarah Moss before but Ghost Wall gets such good reviews that I requested it on NetGalley.

I'm really in two minds about this book, part of me didn't want to carry on reading but this other part of me was furious for Silvie and I had to know what became of her.  I've never read anything like this before and I'm going to look out for more books by Sarah Moss.

If there was a contest of writing, that will require telling a story using the least amount of words, this book would win it this year.
Almost a novella, Ghost Wall is a powerful story that could easily be read in one sitting.
I loved the idea behind this novel. The sacrificed bog girls, whose remains found, as characters they are quiet and unknown, as if they never existed but the proof of them being very much alive is there, in contrast with today's abused women in hands of bad-seed men.
Silvie, short for Sulevia, a Celtic goddess, is living a hard life with her "almost not there" mother and abusive father. This father of Silvie's is a terror.  He crushes both the mum and daughter both physically and psychologically. 
The family is involved in an expedition-like setting, in Northumberland , vast moors, where there is a professor and some students investigating the lives of ancient Britons by replicating the same style of living. 
Silvie's father, Bill, is helping the professor who is seemingly closing an eye on the ways Bill manipulates and uses his family. 
It is not a long story, and I don't want to go on talking about the plot. The story is very powerful and dense. There were bits turned my stomach, and other bits where I felt ashamed/stressed reading on Silvie's behalf.  It is a dark and depressing novel, but very well put together.
Two things I didn't like about this novel, 
1- The narration style. I am not sure if someone went out and about this year to young writers, and recommended them to write in a dreamy, first-person voice with long sentences that's shy to include punctuation to get long listed to awards? Why the sudden explosion of this style of writing? I am not a fan.
2- The ending. It felt a bit hasty. The start was intriguing, but find the ending the weakest point of the book.

Don't get me wrong, this was a really good book. When a book is good, you can't help thinking it could have been better. 4 stars and will definitely be reading Moss again.

A slim book that sucks you in completely. Ghost Wall is the narrative of Silvie, a teenager taking part in a Neolithic re-enactment camp, along with her father, mother, and a professor and his three students. The story is told in Sylvie's voice, the lack of punctuation drawing us into Sylvie's monologue, enhancing our understanding of her experiences. 

The story begins with a chilling description of an event from neolithic times. We are then immediately transported forwards, the tone changing with the party settling into their roles as re-enactors. Before you know it, a tightness is beginning to build beneath Sylvie's words. As the summer heat rises, the story itself becomes cloying, close...we feel a foreboding, something picked out in the words, a building of tension that is not obvious but is very real. Foraging events and campfire evenings become something a little more. Divisions become more apparent, the ingrained sexist and racist views of Silvie's obsessive father seeming to spread subtly over the camp, leaving a troublesome air as events start to ramp up.

At once an observation on how far a group will push itself in unfamiliar territory, a diary of domestic abuse, a comment on gender roles, but also managing to hint at a deeper undercurrent, Ghost Wall leaves you wanting more, yet still strangely satisfied. Leaving much unsaid seems to speak volumes, allowing you to fill in the backstory with your imagination, which I actually felt made the book have more of an impact with me. I read this book in one go, and reaching the end I felt like I'd been holding my breath for the past hour. The quick conclusion leaves us questioning, wondering... but in this case, it adds to the tension. Ghost Wall leaves us with not quite a conclusion but a jarring feeling, to stay ingrained in memory for a while to come. An excellent read.

A short yet strangely chilling read, this book will definitely leave the reader with plenty to mull over. 
Teenage Sylvie has accompanied her history enthusiast father and downtrodden mother on an archaeological experiment, Together with a professor and some students they will try to recreate life in an Iron Age settlement, foraging for food , fishing and trying to snare rabbits , while living in a makeshift camp without any modern comforts. Living in such close quarters puts even more pressure on the already strained and abusive relationship between Sylvie and her father, and soon it seems like he will take things too far, putting her life in danger. 
The sense of oppression and impending tragedy is almost palpable throughout the book, culminating in a scene that mirrors the opening account of a ritual sacrifice almost too closely for comfort. Sylvie herself is a compelling character, strangely naive to the ways of the world but wise beyond her years in her assessment of her family. 
An interesting book.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own

I'm a long-time fan of Sarah Moss, and this book brings together lots of things I love: Moss's gorgeous prose;  her flair for bringing combative, even abrasive characters to life and evoking the oppressive atmosphere they create around them; my own experience on archaeological digs (and practising experimental archaeology); and my interest in the British Iron Age. 

Ghost Wall focuses on liminal spaces: the physical spaces of Iron Age settlements, the practice of ritual torture and murder, subsistence living. Sylvie hovers between childhood and adulthood, caught between her own desire for self-determination and her violent, controlling father. She's snared by his amateur enthusiasm for the past, forced to spend a baking hot summer in a homemade tunic sleeping on a straw sack and eating only what she can catch and her mother can cook on an open fire - while the academics they are living with sleep in modern tents and sneak off to the Spar for ice cream. As tensions within the group grow, it seems that only Sylvie and her father are taking this seriously - but when the group begin experimenting with Iron Age ritual practices, just how far are they willing to go?

The text bluntly peels back the layers of prejudice - racism, classism, misogyny - and more gently explores the ways in which love and fear hold us in abusive situations. I was genuinely afraid for Sylvie, but I admired that Moss's handling of the narrative ensured that I empathised with her even as I raged at her father (and oh, I raged).

I also enjoyed the delicate development of Sylvie's friendship with Molly, from flares of antagonism rooted in mutual misunderstanding and class prejudice to Sylvie's half-suppressed attraction and Molly's concern for her friend's well-being.

This is a read that starts with dissonance and then amplifies it into tension that doesn't stop building until the very last page. It's a short, fast read (you won't want to put it down), and remarkably evocative for it's short length. That said, I would have liked it even more if it had been (slightly) longer. I was hoping for a less abrupt ending; perhaps a touch more closure. But it’s another tour de force from Sarah Moss.

I have enjoyed the writing of Sarah Moss since reading, “Cold Earth,” in 2009 and was delighted to receive her latest work for review.    This is a short novel, almost a novella, but still retains a huge amount of depth and interest.  

A group of people are gathered for a trip in ‘experimental archaeology,’ recreating an Iron Age camp in Northumberland.    There is the professor, Jim Slade, his students; Molly, Dan and Peter, and Silvie and her family.  Silvie is seventeen and lives with her downtrodden mother, Alison, and her father, Bill Hampton.  Usually a bus driver, Bill is obsessed with Ancient Britain and is often used to give practical help, or trade information, with academics.   

Resentful of those he perceives as ‘better than him,’ Bill is aggressive, over-bearing and abusive.   Alison has learnt to keep her head down.   Silvie knows that, however she tries, she will annoy him and then she will have to pay the consequence.

This is an excellent portrayal of the dynamics of a group, thrown together and trying to recreate the past, while being very much in the present.   There are those who are simply there out of interest and those, like Bill, who take it very seriously indeed.   With a glimpse into real life sacrifices, which took place long ago, the men decide to build the ‘ghost wall,’ of the title – a wooden fence, topped with animal skulls to keep out invaders.  Suddenly, without warning, things begin to get just a little serious...

As always, Moss writes beautifully.   This did end a little abruptly and I would have been happier if she had fleshed this out, as it was an interesting idea and I thought the characters well drawn.  Even Bill had a warmer side, as Sylvie thinks back and remembers times when he has been kind to her – trying to include her in his interests, but, ultimately, controlling and short-tempered.   Still, this is well worth reading and I enjoyed it very much.   I received a copy of this from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Ghost Wall takes place in the moody Northumberland countryside and follows 17 year old Silvie who, along with her mother and her abusive father, finds herself joining a professor and three of his students on an archaeological experiment to live how people lived in Iron Age Britain.

Her father is mentally and physically abusive, and is obsessed with the brutality of the Iron Age. He thinks of that period history as a period before immigration - when everything was only British - despite the fact that the country was divided into various pre-Roman clans and cultures during this time, so 'the good old days' of Britain without immigration is a place that simply never existed at all. Naturally, he doesn't quite see it this way.

He's particularly fascinated by the idea of human sacrifice, something he's taught Silvie about, and Silvie herself finds herself relating more and more to these 'bog girls' who were sacrificed by the people who were supposed to love them. There's a heartbreaking moment in which Silvie justifies her father's love for her through these sacrifices, because people only sacrifice, and therefore hurt, the things that they love.

Moss's writing is beautiful. I loved her descriptions of the landscape, and the way she wrote about bog people was stunningly eerie. Considering the extent of her father's abuse, the scenes between him and Silvie could have been gratuitous but they were never written that way; there was a real sense of fear and foreboding whenever her father was on the page, or whenever we knew he was on his way, but he wasn't handled as a caricature and I really appreciated that.

I also loved the way Silvia defended the north of England - particularly the accents. I've experienced it myself (when my Yorkshire accent was much stronger than it is now; sadly I've learned to sound a bit more southern just so people can clearly understand what I'm saying) and it's hard not to get defensive when someone mocks the way you speak, because it's something you can't simply change overnight without sounding like you're putting on a voice.

It wasn't a novella I was completely satisfied with. I couldn't always keep up with whether someone was saying or thinking something, or whether it was just the narrative, because it was written without speech marks and the edition I had from NetGalley was still rather jumbled up in terms of how it was spread out. I actually went through most of this novella thinking it was going to be a 3 star read, but I ended up bumping it to 4 stars just because I was really satisfied with the ending. It wasn't the ending I was expecting and I'm glad it wasn't that ending.

So if you're in the mood for some literary fiction or a moody novella, I recommend giving this one a try! Moss writes beautifully and I'll definitely be reading more of her work in future.

Ghost Wall beings to us the concept of Roleplay but with a twist.
The story starts with a woman being treated likes ones in the Iron Age, and then the narrator Sil tells us how her father is a misogynist, who loves to abuse his wife and his daughter and force them to live under these pretentious conditions just for kicks. Seventeen-year-old Sil is spending her summer in a camp that has been designed in accordance to the Iron age.

The story shows a dysfunctional, abusive father, a meek and passive mother and a daughter thinking of running away from her family, just so she can escape this strange society designed by a Professor and his pupils. Sil, the narrator, and the protagonist tells us her story, and it is easy to follow her character.

The narrative is quite different. There are no dialogues, just thoughts floating around, which I found a bit difficult to understand. The plot starts making sense only after a while and there is a lot of superficials and sometimes archaeological jargon going on. The story highlight how evolution and change in society have not affected the idea of force and coercion. 

Overall, it is a wonderful concept and the short story does justice to it. The characters are easy to understand and the story is relatively fast-paced.

When a group of people come together to re-enact Iron Age life there's a slow spiralling down into the threat of real violence. At the beginning of the story the (historic) ritual killing of a young girl is graphic and utterly terrifying, setting the scene for an underlying sense of dread that permeates the book. There's also humour through the contrast of the 'soft southerners' from the local university reluctantly dressing up in hand-woven tunics and trying to live as hunter-gatherers while the young northern girl (through whose eyes we see the story) lives with a father obsessed by the Iron Age; she and her mother have to take the holiday completely seriously. Dialogue is sharp and witty and the descriptions excellent. A gripping novella.

A short story about an abusive father and a summer camp with a difference. This was a good read and has obviously been well researched and well thought out.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

A short novel about Silvie, a teenage girl living in an archaeological experiment and her abusive father.

I love Sarah Moss and this is a brilliant addition to my bookshelves. It's a really hauntingly atmospheric of a teenage girl Silvie and her parents who go with a professor and some archaeology students to re-enact life in an Iron age settlement. Her father is a brilliantly complex character who rules his family with fear - Sarah Moss moulds your opinion of him subtly but skilfully and the empathy she creates for Silvie and her mother is breathtaking. The plot is slow but powerful with the main focus being on the relationships between the characters and how they shape who they are. Every sentence was brilliantly written - a stunning book.

My joy at learning there was a new Sarah Moss book on the way was tempered only by realising that, at a mere 160 pages, it was more of a novella than a full-length novel. Still, 160 pages of Sarah Moss is better than nothing, not to mention better than almost any other literary fiction I've read so far this year. In the early 1990s teenager Silvie and her mother are dragged, unwillingly, by her father to participate in a summer of immersive, experiential archeology: they will live as the pre-Roman Iron Age inhabitants of Britain did for a month, alongside a university professor and a small group of students. With Silvie's narrative interspersed with that of an Iron Age 'bog girl', sacrificed by her friends and family more than two millenia previously, tension builds as surely as the summer heat.

Ghost Wall is highly atmospheric, with Moss's trademark descriptions of the natural world rendered in exquisite language. There are echoes of her first novel, Cold Earth, here. As in that book, the tension comes from the peculiar effect of being isolated with a group of people, the motivations of whom are not always logical nor easy to predict. However, in Ghost Wall the threat also comes from those closest to protagonist Silvie, and over the 160 pages the sense that those who should be protecting her are instead nudging her ever-closer to danger builds and builds. My only criticism is that I would have happily read another 160 pages of Ghost Wall, but its brevity gives it power, too, demonstrating how quickly a descent into danger can occur.

I'm struggling with this one.

I was intrigued by the premise of 'Ghost Wall' - however, the writing style just isn't for me. 

It's formatted in a way that the actual dialogue runs into the characters inner dialogue without quotation marks to separate the two. As such it's more of a stream of conciousness than a palatable narrative. (E.g. 'I’m sorry, said Mum, I’m late with breakfast, it’ll be a while yet. No, said Dan, it’s fine , we don’t have meal times, Jim keeps saying.')

As for the inner dialogue itself, the main character is younger than her years and as such is her immaturity is communicated in the writing style. I understand that this is necessary, and I'm sure deliberate, given the nature of the story. But I personally find it sets a tone that I find quite repulsive and it doesn't create an enjoyable reading experience for me. (I had a similar issue with 'The Room' by Emma Donoghue.)

Unfortunately it's a DNF for now, although it's short enough that I might go back to it at a later date.

~ Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this title ~