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.

'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 ~

Sylvie's dad is obsessed with the past. She's been forced to spend her summer in a recreation of an Iron Age settlement, wearing scratchy tunics, peeing in the woods and eating meagre rations found in the hedgerows.

Ghost Wall has a slow build tension, as it becomes clear that Sylvie's dad is abusive, controlling every aspect of his wife and child's lives. The camp is being run by a professor, with students who don't take things too seriously, a sore point with her dad. It doesn't take much to set him off and it isn't the students who are the focus of his wrath. I feel like Sarah Moss set out to write a father that was the opposite of Adam in The Tidal Zone.

It's told from the perspective of Sylvie, who makes excuses for her dad. I think deep down she knows what he does is wrong, but she doesn't know any other world. She takes a shine to Molly, one of the students who is confident and carefree. Molly can see through Sylvie's excuses, but what can you do when help is refused?

This all takes place against a backdrop of faux survivalism. As the group try and live the life of ancient Britons, you see how useless modern day humans would be if they really needed to live like that. Has modern farming made things harder?

I enjoyed the parts about what we think life would have been like back then. The professor is academic enough to make it clear we don't know things for certain. Sylvie's dad is quite interested in the bog people, those sacrificed to the peat. The book opens with a scene of from the distant past of a girl being sacrificed, perhaps the one who now resides in a Manchester museum.

It also touches on class and what it means to be British. Sylvie's dad is not too keen on thinking about his ancestors coming from all over the place, but Britons didn't just appear on this island. The students are from the south and Sylvie's family from the north. At times she feels like the students are mocking them, she wants to defend her family even if they are far from perfect.

I did see the end coming, it seemed a logical conclusion, even if I do wonder why certain people went along with it. My heart was in my mouth, although it did end a bit too suddenly. I think open endings are very much a thing Sarah Moss does.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for an advance ARC in return for an honest review.

This novel is not what I thought it would be. From the blurb I was expecting a ghost story linking the two women across history. But this is not the case. Silvie lives on a remote camp participating in a re-enactment of a Neolithic camp. Also on the camp are her parents, three university students and their professor.

The novel is based just after the fall of the Berlin Wall so there is no wi-fi or mobile phones. Silvie has lived sheltered life, influenced by her abusive father. It’s a short novel but I didn’t see the end coming – not that it’s a twist I just couldn’t see where it was going. But ultimately, it’s the contrast between Silvie and the student Molly that stuck with me long after the novel ended.

A very thought provoking book which left more questions than answers, including what would you do if you were in that situation?

It's 1989 and the Berlin Wall has just come down. Teenage Silvie is on an archeological reenactment of prehistoric times, with her mother Alison, and father Bill, a small group of University students and their professor. They are on the moors in the north-east, near Hadrian's wall (and so also the less popularly known Antonine Wall), within tent walls and Iron Age round house walls. Walls loom large in this story.

Bill, Silvie's Dad, is a bus driver and an amateur archaeologist. He's clearly a frustrated man, someone who probably should have got a higher education but didn't (we never find out why not). He corresponds with professors, fat envelopes arrive at the house and he pores over them, and his shelf of 'digging books'. But Bill is a man who holds questionable views - his fascination with ancient Britain (he named his daughter Sulevia, after a local water goddess) filtered through his own outlook, informs them. He's a rumbling storm of a man - the lid, we can tell, is only just holding his anger in most of the time.

There's a lot of archaeology in this, which I loved. I too have an ensuring fascination of bog bodies, ever since we studied 'Pete Marsh' in secondary school (he gets a mention here) and the Scandinavian bog bodies at University. The description at the start - the imagined events at an ancient sacrificial ceremony is so familiar...the girl, her rope of hair, the drums...is this a scene from long ago in Denmark, or not? From the very start there's a troubling subtext rumbling along as to what might happen to someone at the end of this story - but despite this sense of dread I kept reading, long into the night.

As the 'living in the Iron Age' project continues we meet the students, who breezily describe young lives freer than Silve can imagine...how does a person get to Berlin, she muses? She asks herself. Despite the closeness in age between Silvie and student Molly (with whom she strikes up what is probably her first female friendship) they could be from different planets. It is Molly - self-assured and confident - who eventually discovers what is going on in Silvie's family.

Eventually the group (well, most of them) build the "Ghost Wall" of the title, and the final events play out. This could have very easily descended into melodrama, but instead the tension's kept up to the very end, and because we experience it as Silvie (first person is used brilliantly in this story) I found it enormously affecting.

Sarah Moss is one of those authors I have wanted to get to for what feels like ages because I had this feeling that I would adore her work. But sometimes that feeling of a potential favourite author makes me to anxious to actually pick up a book (this is irrational, I know), so I finally jumped at the chance to read and review her newest novel, because it sounds brilliant and it is quite short (I love short books). And I still think that Sarah Moss might be a potential favourite author, even if this book did not quite blow me away.

This book is set over a period of a couple of days, days Silvie and her family are spending in a experimental archeological setting, together with a professor and a few of his students. While the students can sleep in tents, Silvie's controlling and obsessive father forces his family to sleep in what he deems "authentic" huts. Silvie latches onto the sole female student, while trying not to make her father angry (and obviously failing, because he always finds something to be angry about). Moss uses this setting to showcast a variety of awful things: abuse and dysfunctional family dynamics, misogyny and sexism, classism and racism. She does so adeptly and impressively, but it does make for a rather grim reading experience.

The setting and the atmosphere are the biggest strength of this book. Told in long, run-on sentences (a style I particularly enjoy), Sarah Moss plays with the limited variation of their everyday life. The atmosphere becomes ever more oppressive and instilled with a sense of foreboding that made me very scared for Silvie. Moss is in perfect command of her language in a way that made me savour the words and excited for more of her books.

In the end, this book is more a collection of clever observations and vivid scenes than a cohesive whole - it is extremely well-done but did not always work for me. It felt longer than its less than 200 pages because spending time in Silvie's life is suffocating and repetitive, and while I know that this was on purpose and done exceedingly well, I did not always enjoy my reading experience.