Unlike anything I’ve read before mainly due to the setting as it isn’t a very popular time and place for literature. This novella does a lot with little space, it definitely made me want to read more of Moss.

Actual rating 4.5/5 stars.

Ghost Wall follows teenage Silvie as she journeys with her iron-aged obsessed father to a week spent reliving the day-to-day of those who came before. They are joined with their world-weary mother, a professor in the field, and three students. The mismatched group learn to forage for berries, hunt for their dinner, and unpack the stories of the lives lost to the wild bog that surrounds them. But the longer the group spend exposed to this wild way of life the more the echoes of the past start to overpower their modern sensibilities.

I have never before experienced such a threat seem to emanate from the page. Moss delivered her story with such skilful artistry that tension exuded in every sentence. Nature turned from setting to sinister seventh character, as the pages progressed, and I became too aware of the careful placement for every facet for this multi-layered narrative. Yet, however, I was still completely taken by surprise at the sinister unravelling of plot.

I only expected to read a few pages of this and ended up binging through the whole thing, in one sitting. It was nothing to what I thought it would be like, but still completely mesmerising, and involved one of the most harrowing story lines I have ever experienced.

This was an intriguing but disturbing story. Silvie is spending a summer with her parents on an Experiential Archaeology camp with a university group of professor and 4 students. This involves them living as Iron Age humans. It quickly becomes clear that Silvie's dad is an violent and controlling man, giving his wife and daughter physical and emotional abuse. Silvie and her mum are classic cases of abused women and their belief that it is their fault for provoking him is horrific. It's a very thought provoking book and I do recommend it. It's quite short too.

I have recommended this book to everyone I know.
It may be short but it is powerful.
Following a family of three on an unconventional holiday. Tension, dread and uncomfortablity slowly build as the more you read.
This was a wonderful representation on how abuse can build over time until you barely notice it is wrong. And how conditioning and fear can lead you accept a life you don’t deserve.
Beautifully written, with quiet dread. Great read for fans of The Water Cure.

Ghost Wall is a beautifully written strange and twisted tale of Silvie who is spending the summer with her parents in the Northumberland countryside. Thanks to her father’s obsession with the Iron Age, they are taking part in an experimental archaeology exercise to see what life was like then. Just how far will he go in pursuit of an authentic experience?

‘Ghost Wall’ by Sarah Moss is a beautifully written short novel, more a novella at 160 pages. Set in the Nineties it is the story of a re-enactment conducted by a family and a university professor and his students who live in the woods in Northumberland to recreate the lifestyle of Iron Age man. Class issues run throughout; accent, education, north/south, but it is also a time of changes embodied in the character and changing sensibilities of seventeen year old Silvie.
Told completely through the viewpoint of Silvie it juxtaposes the harsh Iron Age life with her own upbringing by authoritarian self-taught father Bill and bland mother Alison who has surrendered to her husband’s will, with the life of the Iron Age bog people. In almost a closed room setting more familiar from crime fiction, the group is thrown into close proximity living in difficult conditions with minimal food. As the story progresses the group becomes divided. The two adult men disappear to work on their ‘projects’ while Silvie’s mum stays in camp to cook and sit around. This leaves the students to their own devices to forage, harvest mussels and skinny dip. It is a haunting story as Silvie tries to mollify her father, who demands exacting behaviour and manners, while student Molly struggles to understand Silvie’s subservience. Tensions grow as Molly encourages Silvie to defy her father. Bill is a traditionalist, he admires Britain’s distant past as a preferred alternative to the modern world.
Ghost Wall is a creeping tale as your nerves tauten waiting for Silvie to be in trouble again, at times I wished for more about her parallel Bog girl. There are clever moments of relief such as the girls’ visit to the local Spar shop for cake and ice cream to relieve the tedium of gruel and rabbit. I was left with the feeling that Moss tried to shoehorn too many issues into a small space – class, male chauvinism, racism, idealism, sexuality, even Brexit, so I was left feeling she had a list of things to mention.
This is an unusual novel, beautifully written. A chilling read. Tense, but not a thriller. The climax when it happens is over quickly and I was left wanting more; the last page came as a surprise and I felt rather disappointed.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

I studied Archaeology at university and so I was drawn to this story, even before it began to show up in so many Books of the Year. Written from the perspective of Silvie, a teenager dragged on an experimental archaeology field trip by her father, you can't initially place the ominous nature of her narrative, but it gently unwinds itself as you explore the environment and daily lives within the camp. This novella will make you question how far the very basics of human nature have really evolved throughout the history of humanity.

I really enjoyed the author's depiction of the landscape and its use as metaphor in the narrative. It helped create a permanent atmosphere of tension. For me however, the promise of the original idea (which I loved) was never fully realised. I still liked this book very much, but I just felt a little short changed.

Ghost Wall (2018) feels like one of those dreams where a character is trapped in a room whose walls keep getting narrower and narrower. We sense the suffocation, the heat, and the walls seem so solid, so inescapable. But the truth is, those walls would crumble, if only we could wake up. They are only ghost walls, after all.

Set during a summer week in the early 1990’s, the story centres on Silvie, a seventeen-year-old girl who has been brought by her father, Bill, along with her mother, Alison, to an experimental archaeology expedition in rural Northumberland. The expedition, run by Professor Slade for three of his university students, aims at giving its participants ‘a flavour of Iron Age life’: in a reconstructed settlement, the group plans to live, for a few days, as the ancient Britons did, mimicking their living conditions, so as to immerse themselves in the past and to recreate the feeling of living in those times.

Silvie’s father, Bill, is a bus driver and amateur historian obsessed with prehistoric Britain. Gradually, though, we find out that his obsession is tinted with violence and strong xenophobia: Bill is an abusive man, who reveres the Iron Age as a symbol of the ‘purity’ of Britain culture before having been ‘sullied’ by foreigners. In a naïve, romanticised view of the past, he fervently longs for a return to the ‘good old days’: “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.”

Meanwhile, he keeps his daughter and his wife under tight control, and frequently resorts to physical and psychological violence. Silvie is always thinking about what not to say or do, so as not to make him angry. She is torn between the desire to please him and the need to escape, and fantasises about getting away: “I didn’t quite know how to ask anything of my own. How do you leave home, how do you get away, how do you not go back?”

Abuse is a kind of psychological haunting, as if a ghost were always hovering over our protagonist: Silvie is as trapped in her family dynamics, as she is by the archaeological expedition to which her father takes her. Bill’s xenophobia and isolationism are expressed not only in the kind of experiment he participates in (and in the way he does it), but also in the way he treats his daughter: he takes an unsympathetic view of the students in the group, and tries to keep her away from them, as if this could ‘contaminate’ her.

And, in a sense, he is right: by seeing her father through the eyes of these strangers, Silvie cannot help but question their family dynamics. Her longing for escape keeps getting stronger. While Bill is beating her, one day, she holds tight to the tree against which he had placed her, and thinks hard about the life inside it – the cells in its leaves, the berries ripening, “the implacable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of the roots below my feet and deep into the earth” – as if she were holding on for dear life, embracing the tree as if it were her own life, her will to live, pulsing inside.

She is constantly fearing that the rest of the group can see the spanking marks on her back, and panics every time someone says something that can make her father mad. She has a ghost wall right inside her mind, preventing her from interacting with her peers in a more carefree, natural way. Every interaction goes through the filter of what her father would do, or think, or feel.

The only thing strong enough to be able to break this wall in her mind is the affection she gradually develops for the other girl in the group, Molly, who forces her to see that there is something very wrong with Bill. As the days get hotter, not only the spartan way of living starts to weigh in on the characters, but also Bill’s intransigent and violent behaviour begins to break through his facade.

The atmosphere gets steadily more claustrophobic and oppressive, building up to a boiling point, where the set of ancient rituals the group is living under grows sinister and alarming, as if the violence of living in so close a touch with nature had gotten under the skin of some of the characters – and, in Bill’s case, had been completely brought out into the open, with everyone’s acceptance. The story culminates in the enactment of an ancient ritual that discloses not only Silvie’s complete vulnerability, but also reveals a very contemporary example of primitive behaviour. Bill’s quest for authenticity can only lead to civilization’s most elemental foundational feature: brutality, rather than purity.

Walls feature constantly throughout the book – the proximity to Hadrian’s Wall, the fall of the Berlin Wall -, and the title itself is a reference to a type of defensive wall made by Iron Age ancients, out of skulls and bones, to scare away their enemies. In this case, the building of the wall itself would involve some kind of sacrificial offering, or people would believe that the ghosts of the beloved ones would protect the tribe against the invaders.

The walls in this book are as full of ghosts as the violence they materialise. Are they an allegory for Brexit? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the walls themselves are ghosts coming back from the past; or maybe they have never really left and were always there, as an unspoken, invisible presence that resurfaces, time and again, only to demand their due, the very element from which such walls are made: the sacrifice of that which one treasures the most. Or maybe we can always choose to wake up and make the walls crumble, or pass through them, to the other side

I read Ghost Wall in about two tube commutes—it is only 150-ish pages long, but it flows so quickly, I tore through it. Moss is up there with Sally Rooney when it comes to writing with hardly any punctuation. Like Normal People and Conversations with Friends, Ghost Wall is written so carefully there's not one point where you're unsure who's talking or what's going on, despite the lack of speech marks (and in Ghost Wall's case, paragraph breaks.

I really loved the portrayal of Silvie's father—it would have been so easy to make him completely one-dimensional, but he was somehow brutish and sado-masochistic and yet still felt real. Even though Ghost Wall is set in the 1990s, it felt relevant to today's current climate—especially the passage where the dad argues that "the British" protected their land from the Romans to the professor, and the professor has to explain that Britain wasn't really a concept at the time. In a way, it was more subtle and nuanced a portrayal of Brexiteers than Jonathan Coe's Middle England, which is actually, you know, set during Brexit.

I found the ending incredibly chilling. The line ["they were going to kill me" (hide spoiler)] sent shivers down my spine. What an excellent, perfectly-crafted, pin-sharp read.

This is a well told exploration of the domineering and abusive relationships at work in a family as they spend their summer holiday participating in an experimental archaeological project by spending two weeks living in an iron age hut. There are some great descriptions of landscape and the natural world in the narrative and the sense of dread is present throughout the book, but I found the prose a little stilted in places and was disappointed that the connections between the past and present weren't more fully demonstrated. Some of the characterisation was absolutely pitch perfect and yet others felt a little one dimensional. All in all, I thought this was a bit disjointed and uneven in places, with some standout moments mixed with some rather bland ones.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

First of all thank you to net galley for this ARC.

Oh gosh I am really not sure about this one. It felt very uncomfortable reading. I can see that the style of writing works well to create a palpable tension throughout the narrative but for me that did not make the book one I would say I enjoyed. There was a huge part of this book (when you consider its short length) that really had me wondering where it was going. It felt disjointed and confusing at times. My biggest problem is that i cannot see why anyone would want to read a story of such unremitting horror without a proper underpinning of narrative. It feels like something that the author couldn't find the substance for so that there is a beginning an an end but no real "guts" to it.

I would probably try something else by this author but would do that picking with great care. I thinks she has literary skill that didn't really shine in this book.

My rating reflects the fact that i felt it was such an uncomfortable read

Short,, sharp, powerful but also light on its feet. Says so much with such economy. A book of the year for me

I was drawn right away into the unusual setting of Ghost Wall. The prose is stunning, and the Iron Age reenactment felt spookily real. This is a dark book with a hopeful protagonist. The natural world is depicted vividly: the bogs and the heat, and the ghosts woven into the landscape. It left a real impression after turning the last page.

I’ve really enjoyed Sarah Moss’s novels and the past and this one is no exception. It centres around teenager Silvie and her parents – downtrodden mum Alison and domineering, bullying father Bill, a bus driver by day and a history-obsessed survivalist at the weekends. During Silvie’s school holiday Bill has dragged his family to an archaeological re-enactment site where they are living the lives of ancient Britons under the supervision of an egotistical Professor and three of his students.

This is a short but very powerful and insightful novel. The iron hand with which Bill rules his wife and daughter is terrifyingly well portrayed. The only glimmer of light in Silvie’s life comes courtesy of one of the students, Molly, who soon cottons on to the dysfunctional family dynamics and befriends the lonely teenager.

There’s a dark and menacing ‘Lord of the Flies’ element to the story as the male characters become ever more deeply immersed in the primitive, prehistoric life they are living, and this leads to a very dramatic and potentially catastrophic ending. It would be great if this was a full length novel (there’s certainly plenty of scope) but as a novella it certainly packs a very powerful punch.

Archaeology is a recurring theme in Sarah Moss’s work: a way of making the effects of the past visible and tangible. When I heard what her new book was about I presumed it would be a reprise of her first, Cold Earth (which I only read earlier this year), a suspenseful speculative novel about an archaeological dig in Greenland at the time of a global plague. The books share a menacing atmosphere and they both ponder historical violence. In Ghost Wall, though, that violence more explicitly spills over into the present.

It’s the late 1980s and teenager Silvie Hampton and her parents have joined a university-run residential archaeology course in the North of England, near the bogs where human sacrifice once took place. Her father is a Rochdale-area bus driver, but British prehistory is his all-consuming hobby, so he’s gung-ho about this experiment in primitive living. They’ll skin rabbits with stone tools, forage for roots and berries, and build a wall of woven willow branches topped with animal skulls. What could be better?! As it turns out, it’s a stifling summer, and the students can’t sneak off to the convenience store or the pub often enough.

Nationalism, racism, casual misogyny – there are lots of issues brewing under the surface here. Mocked for her family’s accent, Silvie is uncomfortably aware of her class. Soon she finds herself attracted to Molly, one of the students. And, always, she must tread carefully to avoid angering her father, who punishes perceived offences with his belt or his fists. Women’s bodies and what can be done to them is central; as the climax approaches, the tricksy matter of consent arises. Though I enjoyed Silvie’s sarcastic voice, I was underwhelmed for much of the book. Yet I ended up impressed by how much Moss conveys in so few pages. It’s a timely #MeToo and post-Brexit story about scapegoating and the transgression of boundaries. If you haven’t read anything by Sarah Moss, do so immediately.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Silvie’s father Bill is obsessed by the lives of our Iron Age ancestors. He is a bus driver, not an academic, but he believes himself in tune with the prehistoric past and considers himself an expert in that kind of subsistence living. And so when he has the chance to re-enact the past in a reconstructed Iron Age settlement in a remote part of Northumberland, he leaps at the chance. He is determined that his wife and daughter will immerse themselves every bit as much. There will be a professor and his small group of students with them, but Bill will not permit them to distract him from his obsession, although he may be able to share with the professor some of his firsthand knowledge of survival.

For Silvie, named after a Celtic goddess, there is no peace to be found in this acted life. With a mother who is emotionally distant and shut down and, more to the point, an abusive controlling father watching her every move, Silvie becomes haunted by those who really did live like this over two thousand years ago and who made the ultimate sacrifice in the ancient bogs, killed by the people they knew. But, although Silvie looks back to the past, she must first survive the present.

Ghost Wall is such a beautiful written, melancholic and mesmerising novella. At about 160 pages, not a word is wasted in evoking this strange world as it exists in the minds of the father, Bill, and in his bullied daughter. Their relationship, so central to the story, is placed in such a fascinating setting – this reconstructed prehistoric settlement – and the past really does infuse the present, even while some of the students do their best to break the rules. The novella begins back in the Iron Age with the sacrifice of young girl and this sets the mood so effectively for what is to come. We spend most of the time deep within Silvie’s thoughts as she tries to carry out the role expected of her while she makes friends with the students whose lives are so very different from her own.

It’s such a tragic story and I think that there is more than enough material here for a novel much longer in length. And that would be my only ‘complaint’. I would have loved more time spent on this archaeological experiment. My background in archaeology really enjoyed this element of the story and I’d have liked much more of it. Also the story comes to a rather hurried finish and, although I found the ending very good, I thought more could have been made of it. But having said all that, Ghost Wall is such an immersive read that you’ll probably finish in one sitting, as I did. It’s haunting and elegant while also depicting something of the harshness of the Iron Age and the unforgiving nature of its spiritual beliefs. This was a time when life could be a daily struggle, lived in debt to the gods, but for Silvie life is hardly easier. Sarah Moss mingles so perfectly, and disturbingly, the distant past and present and the result is spellbinding.

When I read the synopsis for the book, I was intrigued and then when I googled the author, I was even more intrigued. This was the first time I was actually reading the author’s work and I was suitably equal parts excited and equal part cautious. However I am glad that in this particular instance, my excitement was worth it.

The book starts with immersing us into immediate action, the writing is so, so good I almost didn’t care that I didn’t understand everything that was happening within the first few percent of the book. The atmosphere is ever present and ever eerie. Moss really knows how to show rather than tell and seriously, I think one of the biggest points in its favour are the descriptions, the beautiful prose, the haunting atmosphere and the almost monster sitting on our chest feeling that I got while reading this was totally worth it.

In a camp in Northumberland, a professoor and his students are trying to live out the harsh and almost brutal realities of the Iron Age. As time passes, things start to look and feel not quite right, and slowly, things go awry in every which way possible. Throughout this all is Silvie, an innocent in the middle of the mess.

Silvie’s father Bill is an absolutely ghastly human being and even worse father to Silvie and her mother isn’t any better. Bill is an absusive, controlling and ignorant man and he proves that time and again in this book, I almost couldn’t read sometimes and had to pause at times because how very much I wanted to throw my iPad across the room. That’s how angry I was at him. His wife, Silvie’s mum, isn’t really any better, I am not sure if she’s been beaten down by Bill or if she’d always been this way. Either way, at one point, she had needed to take up the stance to protect Silvie from the monstrosity that was her father but she didn’t and for that, I can’t quite forgive her. I am aware how that sounds and I am aware that sometimes (most times) abused women are too beaten down to change things for their offspring but it just made me so very angry.

Silvie and Molly were, in their own way, the rebels and the driving force of the story. I absolutely loved them and felt for them and just wanted to keep them safe. The fact that Moss managed it in almost 150 pages was absolutely unbelievable. A haunting tale of abuse, ignorance, prejudice, misogyny and racism, with some truly wonderful historical touches, this book made me really happy with the fact that I was allowed to have the ARC for this.

Overall, an absolutely wonderful read if a bit dark and a bit scary. I read it in almost one sitting and trust me, I am gonna be reading it again if I have any say about it.

A beautiful short story. It’s a very raw, unfiltered story abuse and family. Certainly found this book interesting. Thank you to both NetGalley and Granta Publications for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

Haunting and eerie, incredibly well paced and with that tight control Moss always has over her subjects. Resonant beyond the page.