I was really pleased to have been sent this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the premise of it and while it took me a while to get used to the stream of consciousness narrative and lack of punctuation, I was increasingly drawn in. 

Very subtle hints as to Silvie’s home life, the anxiety that radiates off her as she's tempted to the local shop and the sudden, fast ending that left you wanting more meant that you felt you were really with her the whole time. 

I feel it could have done with a few more pages (because I want to know what happened next!) and I do think the style of narrative will put off some people, but on the whole I thought this was a great story, well told.

This is a novel about 17 year old Silvie and her parents.  Her father Bill, a bus driver, is somewhat of a self-taught expert on Ancient Britain and is often called upon by academics for support and it is though this means that the family join an archaeology professor (Jim) together with 3 of his student to spend the summer at an Iron Age camp in Northumbria.  Silvie is the narrator and much of the text details their Sunday afternoon walks across the bogs of the wild landscape.  Slowly the narration changes and we witness the harsh life the women in the family are exposed to through his temper and violence.  For example he sneers at sanitary products and thinks Silvie should just manage just as the Ancient Britons did.  The style in which this is written is almost stream of consciousness with Silvie’s thoughts both poetic but enjambed.  Underneath all the tension mounts, with Molly the student challenging Bill and undermining him, whilst Silvie is aware that she will bear the brunt of this.  It is hard to believe she is 17 for she succumbs time and again to her father’s dictates.

The novel ends fairly rapidly with the tension building to the last minute.  I was scared for Silvie, really scared, dreading a ‘Lord of the Flies’ type ending.  All in all an uncomfortable read but certainly interesting, even if I am not that interested in things Ancient Britain or how to skin a rabbit or forage.

Thank you to the author, publishers and NetGalley for providing an ARC via my Kindle in return for an honest review.

Short but powerful. An exciting first novel that is unusual in that it could have benefited from another 50 pages as opposed to so many bloated novels out there.

Very exciting new talent.

Sylvie and her mother are spending the summer living as iron age people, together with her tyrannical and brutal bus driver father and a professor and some of his students.  They search and hunt for food on the northern moors.  Sylvie's father and the professor are fascinated by the bog people, and in particular the ritual sacrifice of young female victims.  Sylvie's first person narrative is increasingly linked with the bog people and victims.  

This is a lyrical novel, the wild beauty of the landscape is vividly described as is the personality of Sylvie - cowed into accepting the brutality of her father as normal, just as the bog victims accepted their fate.  Short and worth reading.

Thanks to netgalley for the chance to read and review. This does not affect my opinions of the book. 
A young girl is being sacrificed to the bog in iron age times. The reasons are unclear but the emotions spark and drag you in. Fast forward to modern day and a young woman is spending a summer re-enacting iron age times with her family, a group of students and their professor. What starts out as a seemingly harmless exercise in experiencing history, quickly takes a dark turn. The final 10% of the book hand my heart in my throat as I wondered if they would actually go ahead with their re-enactment. 
A gripping, fast paced read. Highly recommended.

One of the things I admire most about Sarah Moss’ writing is the subtle way she weaves creepiness into seemingly ordinary sentences. She loads menace and threat into apparently ordinary exchanges, building tension until the novel’s denouement. Ghost Wall is relatively short but it still manages to be an intimate portrait of an unhappy family as well as tableau encapsulating the various difficulties and injustices when humans ‘other’ one another. Meditating on class distinctions and various other issue, Ghost Wall manages to be unsettling and poignant. It didn’t quite land the ending for me but otherwise a very controlled piece of work.

Bite-size Books: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

The Book Digested:

Silvie is a teenage girl living in replica. The hot and itchy tunic on her back, the tools in her hands, the food in her mouth: they are all imitations of a world that has long since vanished. Unfortunately for her, Silvie's father wants to return there. Bill has dug so far back into the past (in search of Britain's 'pure' unadulterated roots) that now he, his family, a professor, and three students are stuck in the woods pretending to live in the Iron Age. For the others, this offers an exercise in experimental archaeology. For Bill, it provides an opportunity to play out good old-fashioned values (read violence and patriarchy) and resurrect rituals that should remain forever buried. As Silvie forages for food with the students, she is captivated by Molly's wild and unwielding nature, but back at camp her own spirit is constantly diminished. Will she ever escape and flourish? Or must she remain like the bilberries they seek amongst the heather: hidden in shade by leaves that purport to protect them, even as they refuse them access to light?

Vintage:

Fresh! (To be published September 2018)

Key notes:

Family, history, violence, adolescence, feminism, (queer) love, national identity

Delectable quotes:

"Of course, that was the whole point of 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."

"Light blinds you; there's a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside." 

Dessert:

(Fiction) Ghost Wall plays with the past's tendency to bubble up in the present, often violently. For another experiment in cyclical and terrible revivals of pain, try Toni Morrison's Beloved.

(Non-fiction) Sarah Moss has evidently completed extensive research for this book, but she doesn't place such knowledge clumsily. Instead, it infuses the whole narrative and creates an atmosphere that suggests an authentic re-enactment is taking place before us. For those wanting to know more about the time her characters are so keen to return to, try Peter Vilhelm Glob's The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved.

Any book that has bog bodies, female protagonists, fucked up family dynamics, cults, and implied lesbian feelings is sure to be a winner for me. I ate this book up in an afternoon, and the ending sent chills down my spine even in 30 degree weather. My only complaint would be the lack of speech marks, but I'm just fussy.

Silvie has to spend her holiday with her parents at an archaeological experience camp.  Her father and a professor spend the days boosting each other's egos and 'playing at Iron Age'.  The students and Silvie have to forage whilst Silvie's mother is expected to create filling meals for everyone out of non-existent ingredients.

Bill, the father, is a frustrated by his job as a bus driver, his failure in education and his lack of status in the history world.  He takes out his anger on his wife and child, beating them both.

As the camp progresses the reenactment ideas become more crazy but Silvie is too scared to say no.  

It is a frightening tale, from the early descriptions of the bog woman's sacrifice to the modern day climax.   Whilst this a short book I was grateful that the author did not over-egg the descriptions of the camp lifestyle and gave a satisfying, realistic ending.

I was given an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review. 

This book is phenomenal. It’s short, but the intense intensive literary imagery contrasting with the starkness of the words sets the mood well. You know freaky shit is about to happen well before does. Ties together the underlying connections between racism, xenophobia, obsessiveness, and gendered violence. 

Also, I learned a lot about Ancient Britain, which was unexpectedly interesting.

I have long been an admirer of Sarah Moss's work and this short compelling novel does nothing to alter that opinion. The story of Silvie's 'holiday' at a reconstructed Iron Age camp is told in an understated but compelling style, and the underlying themes of patriarchy and domestic violence are handled subtly. Highly recommended.

I loved The Tidal Zone so much that I added every single one of Sarah Moss’ books to my TBR. I still haven’t actually gotten my hands on any of them so when I saw Ghost Wall on netgalley I was really excited and requested it immediately. Ghost Wall follows Silvie, a 17 year old girl (who I initially thought was around 12, not really sure where I got that impression from) and her family, who are all staying at a camp in Northumberland focused on re-enacting life in the Iron Age. It quickly becomes evident that Silvie’s father is abusive to both Silvie and her mother and his obsession with the re-enactment combines with it to take things to dangerous extremes. Unlike The Tidal Zone I didn’t find the characters very relatable and I found it hard to care, had it not been as short as it was I would have DNFd it.

**Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book through netgalley in exchange for an honest review

The blurb reeled me in. It’s tough luck if your Dad is a re-enactment nut for how Iron Age people lived, but Sylvie’s (Sulevia) Dad is something far worse. A cruel bully and tyrant whom Sylvie and her mother are terrified of. A “practical archaeology” field trip gone beyond hunting/gathering/foraging. The “Ghost Wall” only makes a brief appearance in the last third of the book and does not really add to the story.
It is a small book, but it probably should have been a short story.

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
More of a short story or novella with its length at 160 pages, this book conveys a lot without actually saying that much. 
It’s the story of Silvie and her family, made up of her history buff (sadistic) father and subservient (beaten down) mother. The three of them are recreating the past in an archaeological experiment along with some less than enthusiastic students. This is a tale about control and abuse and makes for a tense read but overall the story itself needs fleshing out more and could have done with those extra pages.

2.5

There just wasn't enough tension in this book for me.
You could see where it was building up to... there were mentions of abuse,threats of temper and actual violence... but as a whole the story led me nowhere.

Sarah Moss is consistently brilliant - this is no exception.  Silvie is spending the summer with her parents, an archaeology professor and his students on a "living archaeology" experimental camp.  Her father is controlling, abusive and obsessed with a mythical pure Britain of the past.  There's a real sense of the claustrophic nature of his control,. and how he and the professor become obsessed with the ideas and sweep almost everyone along with them - the ending was both a relief and a sense of there must be more, it can't be over!  Would be excellent for reading groups and would highly recommend.

I really did not enjoy this book.  Many years ago, I read Night Waking by the same author, and I absolutely loved it.  It is possibly the best book I have read, portraying that phase of early motherhood, when you loose a sense of who you are.  I was really excited to see this new book was available to request.  While the writing was beautiful, (I particularly enjoyed the nature writing) I really disliked this story.  It felt disturbed and very uncomfortable after reading it.  I would not recommend it.  Equally, I will not be tweeting about it, nor will I review it on my blog.  It just wasn't for me.

When I started reading Ghost Wall, the forthcoming novel from Sarah Moss about a group of people setting up camp close to Hadrian’s Wall as an exercise in experiential archaeology, I surmised from the demeanour of Silvie, its protagonist (and narrator), she was far younger than her actual age. I took her to be a precocious eleven, possibly twelve-year-old, only to discover after reading for some time she was in fact seventeen. The reason for my misjudgement was partly her father, Bill’s behaviour towards her, since he treated her like a little girl, but also because she complied with his every wish in a most un-teenage-like way.

Bill Hampton is a bus driver from Burnley with an all consuming interest in the lives of Ancient Britons and an enormous grudge against those he perceives as belonging to a higher or more educated class than his own. His depth of knowledge about living off the land has gained him a reputation among academics as being a handy amateur to have on call, and has led to him being invited, along his wife and daughter, to spend a short period living in a remote, authentically recreated Iron-Age village in Northumberland.

The family share the experience with Professor (“call me Jim”) Slade and the students responsible for building the village and making the scratchy tunics and crude moccasins they now must wear. Silvie is immediately attracted to the only female student in the group, a confident, prepossessing individual called Molly, who seeks to educate (some might say ‘lead astray’) her slightly younger friend.

At Bill’s insistence, Silvie (short for Sulevia) and her mum, Alison, move with him into a great open-plan roundhouse, sleeping on lumpy handmade bunks, while the others – much to his chagrin – opt to pitch their waterproof tents around the place. Bill is a stickler for authenticity and detests anything that reminds him of the modern world. His list of dislikes also include women’s “undies”, footling about “like an old woman” and female sanitary products (which, he says, women managed “well enough without back in the day”). It is probably an understatement to suggest that women in general make Bill feel queasy.

It becomes apparent fairly early in the novel that Bill is both bigot and bully, though he skilfully conceals the results of the rough treatment he deals out to his wife and daughter from others in the camp. Alison tells Silvie her father can’t help his behaviour, that he’s always had a bad temper, and advises her to simply do as he says. She certainly tries to keep him happy, but she’s a bright young woman and forgets herself by “answering him back” (i.e., makes perfectly sensible comments and suggestions).

As Bill’s conduct becomes ever more obsessional and domineering, Molly begins to see that all is not well with the Hampton’s. Then events come to a head when a re-enactment of a sacrificial ritual is taken too far.
In her Acknowledgements, Sarah Moss reveals that the genesis of this story came firstly from participating in a Northumbrian residency to celebrate the Hexham Literary Festival, and then from the ‘Scotland’s People’ exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland, where she spent time with “the possessions and bodies of Iron and Bronze Age residents of the borderlands.”

Moss’s slender novel, which I devoured in one sitting, is menacing and brutal, but also filled with yearning, sensuality and hope. It has much to say about female affinity and friendship.

<I><blockquote>Because they are men, I thought, because they're in charge, because there will be consequences if you don't. I didn't see how she could not know that.</I></blockquote>
A short, almost impressionist piece of writing in which Moss swirls together strands about gender, class, prejudicial nationalism and a kind of atavistic mentality that foreground both the use and abuse of power. 

The writing is subtle and loaded, the tension rising with the heat and the increasing violence as rabbits are skinned for food, their heads boiled for the construction of the menacing ghost wall. 

The lord-of-the-flies-alike ending is both flagged from the start but also not quite believable - and leaves us a little stranded as the piece ends abruptly. 

Nevertheless, the control in the writing is striking, and Moss has created a nicely complicated relationship in that between Sylvie and her father: her memories of their closeness when she was a child, the security of holding his hand, offering both a stark contrast and key to their present tension. 

Best read in a single sitting, this is a stark and powerful pieces of writing alive to small movements, moments of complicity and rebellions, and the consequences that ensue.

This is a tense page turner with a very well handled sense of building menance.  The control of women by men down the ages seems especially relevant at the moment.