Unfortunately, I gave up reading this book and I regret it. I didn't find the characters deep enough and I wasn't carried away by th plot.
Sadly it's a DNF :(

Unique, character-driven concept, although the pace may not please all readers. Still, a recommended purchase for collections where dystopian is particularly popular.

What promised to be a really interesting concept unfortunately fell flat for me. With a dystopian story like this, the threat (in this case, the 'ghosts') should be clearly laid out early on for the reader. Even by the end of the book, I still wasn't really sure what this world-ending issue was or how it worked which made it difficult for me to connect to much of the story. It also wasn't entirely clear to me whether or not this was about magic or technology or supernatural elements so some parts of the book felt jarring and disconnected. The writing was beautiful in a lot of places though. Interesting idea but lacked execution for me sadly.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for giving me this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a gripping read, I thought the characters were intriguing and I'm going to keep an eye out for more from this author.

I requested this book because of the mentioning of Station Eleven in the promotions. This book is set in Estonia, and meaningfully so, because the internet, as we know it, collapses and the main character, Katerina learns to trust others. The concept was interesting, and the characters likeable. The plot unravels slowly and it took me a while to get into story. I also had a hard time finding the characters’ curious sides. What stayed with me is the themes of trust, the appreciation for now and knowledge, and acceptance. I will probably keep thinking about the underlying story and the allegories for weeks to come. I prefer a different, more layered and nuanced writing style, however because of the complexity of the concept and the setting, and the ghosts in the forest (nice play on the ghost in the machine, probably) idea, the style was a good fit. It is a matter of personal preferences, and those who are new to the dystopian genres, magical realism and allegorical writing would enjoy this read plenty. I will look into the other work by this author.

a thank you to netgalley and publisher for the arc of this title in exchange for an honest review.

Katerina was a photo journalist before the internet escaped its confines and digital ghosts started roaming the earth. Now she is a healer. She uses her grandmother's recipes for herbs to help her grandmother's small town stay alive after what you could call an apocalypse. They call Katerina a Strega because what she does seems like witchcraft and it doesn't help that she is not like them in appearance. Her father was from India so her skin is dark compared to theirs. When she went to a nearby village to trade she found a boy waiting for her with a note from his father asking her to look after him. Not knowing who Aleksander (the boy's father) is, she still takes the boy home with her to look after. The boy doesn't talk. But soon she receives messages and signs of flood, famine and danger coming. The bees keep warning her as well, that she must find the boys father. The ghosts of the internet are starting to become contagious and deadly. And prejudice causes a lot of strife.

I liked the concept of this book, but there is something about it that I would change in the advertising for the book. This is a book about prejudice and acceptance. Not really about the internet breaking free of its confines. It is about a kind and broken woman helping others when she doesn't have the world to give. Katerina is mother Teresa who speaks to bees and knows what plants can help people. She just wants to be accepted and she is turned away at every turn.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this before publication (November '24).
We Are AllGhosts In The Forest by Lorraine Wilson.

I struggled initially with the book, for the first few chapters I didn't have a clue what was happening, and while I was aware it was describing a time following a digital apocalyptic event, one that has left the contents of the digital world to roam the world as ghosts, I felt a little more early description would have guided me into the book more easily. Everything seemed very random with no lead-in.
However once the book found its feet, I was gently and slowly hooked in.
Katerina is, for the reason mentioned above, now living in her Baba's (Grandmother's) house, somewhere in the Baltics. She is fully self-sustainable, living in a world with no internet or phones, and the world for her is her smallholding and the few people she lives close to. She is an herbalist and healer and travels to other towns nearby to trade her medicines and creams for necessities. For reasons that become evident later in the book she is loathe to get close to people, and only wants to focus on keeping her part of the world safe and looked after.
She returns from one of her trips with a mute teenage boy, he has a note from his Father asking Katerina to take care of him, she does not understand why he would have chosen and trusted her but it is not in her nature to turn him away, she ropes him in to help her. Katerina can communicate via scrying and can see his Father is unwell and needs help, but she has to decide what is the safe thing to do as there is a digital virus that could threaten their people and crops.
I did have to suspend belief initially however the further I read, the more the book felt in tune with the state of our world. We are slowly destroying the planet with seemingly no real intention to scale back with our damaging behaviours and our increasing reliance on digitisation is frightening, what would happen if that were to suddenly not be there?
Katerina and most of the characters are back in tune with the land and its inhabitants, and it is abundantly clear that if were able to heal the land then it would repay us in spades.
Overall I would definitely recommend this book, however,be patient with the first few chapters.

“Information wants to be free” – remember that old saw? It’s often or usually attributed to Stewart Brand, co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a central countercultural text focused on do-it-yourself, self-sufficiency, and alternative lifestyles. Those Boomers! (Disclosure: I am a late boomer. Sorry.) They talked a good game. All about the freedom and the Homebrew (including the computer club) and sticking it to the Man.
But then they were the Man, and it turned out that “information wants to be free” wasn’t so much a slogan against corporations as an excuse not to pay independent artists, freelancers, writers, musicians and anybody else with a stake in making a living in a creative way. The end-game to all this tech boostering appears to be the LLMs harvesting content from the internet, scraping copyright material, including this blog (probably), and producing a close facsimile of the same content.
What does all this have to do with We Are All Ghosts in the Forest? Well, it struck me that one way of reading this was as a novel about enshittification. The central idea here is that all the information set itself free; the internet (which is everything) stopped working, and all the information dispersed and became ghosts of itself. So the ghosts in this world are news reports, snatches of audio, photographs, video clips. Everything is information, including people, and information wants to be free. So it is everywhere and nowhere. Like sand, it gets into everything, gets into buildings, gets into people. The death of everything by entropy.
Remember when Google was useful? Remember being able to, say, look up an Edward Hopper painting, and what you got was information about Edward Hopper and his paintings? Instead of what you get nowadays, which is a bunch of so-called AI-generated Edward Hopper pastiches, mixed in with some actual Edward Hopper paintings, but the difference is meaningless. Because all information is equal and it’s all noise. Bad information attaches itself, parasite-like, to good information. The heat death of the information universe, the enshittification of everything.
And how does one live in which the internet has set itself free and there are information ghosts? Well, taking a leaf from the Whole Earth Catalog and John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, you live like a mediaeval peasant. You grow your own food, you trade, you make herbal remedies, you keep chickens.
(I was just in an “Animalerie” near us, and they had a lot of chickens for sale. I am here to tell you, they stink. Just in case you think this kind of lifestyle sounds attractive.)
Still, this self-sufficient life is how our protagonist Katerina lives. She used to be a photojournalist. Not by coincidence (I think) this is exactly the kind of job that goes away in a media universe where the corporations seek content they don’t have to pay for, because, hey, information wants to be free. Katerina is like all of us: she lived in a world entirely dependent on technology that she barely understood. And when the internet went away, it was replaced with exactly the kind of magical thinking we all use from time to time. My printer isn’t working, but if I do this, and then this, I might fix it. My TV screen is blank, but if I turn it off and unplug it and (very importantly) wait ten seconds and then start it all up again, voila.
Magical thinking: we’re all guilty of it, and this is how Katerina lives. You have to think the right way when you do something, or it won’t work. This is about the power of language: about how saying things makes them true. Katerina keeps chickens and goats and bees, and she talks to the bees. The bees talk back. She makes herbal remedies: some to keep ghosts away, some for painkillers, sore muscles, and so on. She trades with her neighbours, and they’re fine with her until they’re not. The world works like this, and wise/wyrd women throughout history have known it. You’re a healer, you’re a herbalist, you’re a fixer—until someone says the word, and you are a witch.
Where are we? Somewhere in the North of Europe, Finland possibly, or in the Baltics. This is where Katerina has ended up, in her grandmother’s village. She gets along, and she is self-contained and self-sufficient, living on the edge of a village on the edge of Europe. But on a trading trip, she comes across a silent boy who has a note addressed to Katerina asking her to look after him. Who is the boy’s father, and where has he gone? The boy can’t tell her, but she takes him home, and that’s when her troubles begin.
A great work of imagination, this, a novel that makes you think about the way we live, that offers a sideways look at how the pandemic affected us, and how we depend too much on our screens and our networks. It’s about folklore and herbalism and self-sufficiency, magical thinking, bread-making, DIY, homebrew, alternative lifestyles, and the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of her face.

‘She thought it was one of the world’s greatest tragedies that these moments, each tiny one, were each so easy to overlook. That it took the threat of losing them to make you weigh them and realise they were made of gold.’

‘We Are All Ghosts In the Forest’ is a very introspective tale which follows Katerina, a former photojournalist turned herbalist who is haunted by her past and the death of her sister. It’s set in Estonia in the not so distant future, after the internet has crashed, leaving tangible and terrifying ghosts of the internet’s contents behind, which vary in their level of danger from a piece of map, to a recording of Oppenheimer’s ‘I am become death’ speech. Each of these ghosts can touch and affect reality in their search for their new home, with devastating consequences for the world and for the human race. These ghosts are capable of infecting humans with a new digital disease, which turns every part of them into static and code, killing them.

After the collapse, Katerina moved back to her Grandmother’s old home, a small village where she brews and creates herbal remedies for the townsfolk. On a venture south for trade, she meets a strange mute boy named Stefan in a marketplace who hands her a note from his father, in which he claims to know her, and asks her to take care of him.

The book starts off very slow, focusing on Katerina and Stefan’s daily activities in the village, their growing suspicion about a new contagious digital disease that is spreading, and the growing mystery that is Stefan’s father. I found it a little hard to get into at the start, because the world-building and mechanics of the ghosts was confusing and hard to grasp, but around 6 chapters in something clicked, and I was fully immersed. The cast of characters is rather small, allowing the author to focus on crafting the central characters carefully. Throughout the book I grew to care for Katerina and Stefan greatly, and felt everything she felt as the book progressed. The ongoing mysteries in the book were exciting and I loved watching them unravel.

This book has been labelled as reminiscent of fairytales, and it definitely is. The wolves and the forests, as well as the message and morals of the story. I loved the found-family element, and Katerina and Stefan’s relationship was absolutely precious. Overall, my only issues were the confusing world-building and very slow first act, and I was very enchanted by this book. The premise of the internet crash is fascinating and while unlikely, I would love to see more in this world or hear more about what the ramifications of the crash were on the world.

To begin with my first impressions of this book was mild confusion , I didn’t really know what was happening in the story. There appeared to have been a dystopian episode, leaving the population, decimated, and resulting in ghosts, forming from electronic media, which roamed the world interacting with people left behind
I was expecting a more straightforward dystopian novel and I was not expecting what was special about this book. I was glad however, that I persevered as ultimately I ended up enjoying the novel
A third of the way through the story, starts to make a bit more sense I started to to enjoy it more.
There are moments within this novel of startling poetic beauty which I particularly enjoyed. The author has a beautiful way of describing physical and emotional worlds of the story.
I would recommend this book to readers, who like a dystopian novel however, if you are more of a fan of magical reality, you might also like this book
I read an , early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK, the book is published in the UK on the 7th of November 2024 by Solaris.
This review will appear on NetGalley, UK, Goodreads, and my book blog bionicSarahS books.wordpress.com. After publication, it will also appear on Amazon, UK.

I requested this book because Lorraine Wilson's novella The Last to Drown packed a huge emotional punch for me. I finished and physically sobbed. I've never experienced such a strong emotional reaction to a book before. So going into this, I was expecting much of the same. Although We Are all Ghosts in the Forest didn't make me experience the same emotional connection (and it was never going to, the themes are different), it has the same slow, melodic character-driven pace. Wilson has a beautiful turn of phrase which verges on lyrical, and perhaps in some senses, nonsensical. In some cases, it blew me away, in others I just wanted her to be more literal. For both of these factors, the pacing and the prose, it won't be for everyone. You have to take your time to soak in the words, and honestly, I skipped some. I was too impatient. But the pay-off is there if you're willing to stick around.
We're introduced to Katerina, an outsider, finding her feet in a world post-crash, where the internet has escaped its binds and data has coalesced in the natural world as 'ghosts'. This premise really drew me in and the world building, having different types of ghosts, captured my attention. But, as I said, this book isn't about the plot, and more the character. We learn that Katerina has secrets, she carries the memories of her sister and mother as a burden. Her trauma is her own personal ghost that she needs to deflect, proving a bigger issue to her than the visible ghosts around her that she's immune to. When she is forced to offer a young boy protection, she faces the choice of letting down her guard and welcoming people into her life, or continue to keep her distant. I didn't understand the connection between Katerina and the boy's father, but his value is immense.
This story has belonging at its heart, demonstrating that people don't need to understand the struggles and history of a person in order to connect with them and make them feel at home.
"If you don't fit, you are always on the edges, and the people on the edges are the first ones to get shut out."
Ultimately, we are the same at our core, each with burdens, trauma, and struggles, and we should all try to be the best we can be, avoiding division, conflict and the marginalisation of people different to us. We are all ghosts in the forest.

DNF at 10% / start of chapter 4.

The premise of the story sounded really intriguing to me and I found the title and cover drew me further in. Unfortunately, it was way too slow and too heavily character based for my own personal taste.

We learn from the book description that the modern day internet has collapsed and digital remnants or ghosts are left behind and they seem dangerous. However I feel as if the first part of the book should be setting the world up and explaining how it happened and the history of this huge life changing event and it doesn’t. The story brings you in without knowing this and mentions some vague notions towards the event without going into more detail. I was expecting a fast paced, exciting dystopian world and it doesn’t seem to be this way from the part I read.

If you don’t mind a much slower paced, character building story then you may enjoy it but this one just wasn’t for me.

'To a certain extent you are always prey when you meet wolves in the woods. It us only a question of hunger.'

Wilson has a real gift for writing modern fables, engaging traditional, often folkloric storytelling modes but presented in a way as to highlight their relevance to a contemporary audience.

We are All Ghosts in the Forest is set in a post apocalyptic or at least post modern societal world. After the collapse of the internet the world was flooded with digital ghosts: large cities and towns are now uninhabitable to humans who have been driven back to trying to live with nature in smaller communities.

Katerina, the MC, excels at this having fled the overrun cities to her grandmother's cottage on the edge of a wood. Not that she is free of risk here. Fragments of the internet have even wandered this far and the wild has its own dangerous. Katerina is a loner, slow to trust others and full of a deep, somewhat justified conviction that she does not fit in or mesh with other people. When she is entrusted with the care of a mute child, she is forced to confront both her own ghosts and the digital disease which is eroding humanity.

This story is many things - a modern fairytale, a love letter to forgiveness, self acceptance and the natural world, a meditation on the dangers of misinformation, a reflection on and a genuinely creepy story about the consequences of allowing an idea to infect you. Expect a slow burn start - which you need, frankly, because this is a book to bring your for - and enjoy the gradual unfolding of a beautiful, disquieting world before the pace grabs you by the throat and won't let you go. In addition, despite its deep themes, this is ultimately a feel good story even when things look desperate - something the author excels at is examining disaster and despair, then offering real threads of hope.

A beautiful book and a stunning accomplishment. Lorraine Wilson's best novel yet.

Dnf. Too much meandering and I just could not get into the story., this may have been a personal issue as I wasn’t keen on the writing style. Not a bad book but not for me