Ghost Wall is a subtle and unnerving novel about a girl forced into a summer of experimental archeology by her abusive father. Sylvie is seventeen and is spending her summer at a recreated Iron Age camp in Northumbria, as her father—who is obsessed with recreating the hardship of Iron Age life—works with an archeology professor and some students to live like people might have in the past. Sylvie and her mother live in the shadow of her father and his anger and rules, but in the heat of the summer and the bare landscape near Hadrian's Wall, his beliefs might be turned into something else, something inspired by the bog girls who were forced into sacrifice many years ago.

This is a short novel that creates a strange and tense atmosphere through description and detail. Sylvie's life is depicted through her perspective of the events at the camp and how she knows about foraging and survival, in contrast to the three students who are on the trip. Moss weaves in tensions around misogyny and class to the narrative, which is centred around abuse by those closest to you. At the same time, it is about Sylvie being aware that there is more to life that what her father is trying to force her to be, hints of coming of age with the backdrop of an unusual and difficult childhood.

Ghost Wall is a compact novel that tells a small story featuring a small cast of characters staying in a camp in the wilderness. It also spans many hundreds of years, telling a story of force and coercion that hasn't changed much. Its structure—short and descriptive with a sudden conclusion—might not appeal to everyone, but this is one for people who are interested in trying to know the past, but also depict a more modern day experience in fiction.

You may be familiar with those colourful historical re-enactment days put on by devotees of a certain time or place – perhaps the English Civil War, or the American War of Independence, or maybe life in a medieval village. In ‘Ghost Wall’ Sarah Moss tells the story of historical enthusiasm taken much further. Teenager Silvie (an abbreviation of Sulevia, the Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools), named out of her father’s passion for Ancient British life – a lifestyle that particularly appeals to the brute in him - finds herself camping out ‘Ancient style’ with her bullying father and subservient mother who have joined Professor Slade and three archaeology undergraduates. (Her father is recognised as a self-taught expert on the period.)
Soon it is clear that Silvie and her mother live in terror of their father/husband. He is cruel in every way possible, viewing women as chattels, scorning his daughter’s opinions and despising his wife. A successful day is a day when he hasn’t been annoyed by them and those days rarely happen. Over the course of the novel, verbal abuse aside, Silvie’s mother is bruised by his rough handling whilst Silvie is whipped savagely because she is caught bathing in a stream. Abuse in their household is clearly commonplace. The only person to seriously question his behaviour is Molly, one of the three students, and she is the person in whom Silvie confides when the full horror of her father’s re-enactment plans are revealed.
This is a wonderful novel. Sarah Moss creates really credible characters. It is very moving to read of the ways in which Silvie tries to stay true to her curious, sociable self, whilst gradually being ground down by her very scary and manipulative father. Equally we feel sympathy for Alison, his wife, whose daily mission it is not to be ‘annoying’. She has become nothing more than a servant shadow and it’s very easy to understand why. Silvie’s father is a monster. Whilst there are hints at why he may be such a sadistic megalomaniac – his wife’s excuse is that he is frustrated by his lack of formal education - it’s clear that his nationalistic fervour and misogynistic ways are unchallenged in his household, creating a toxic blend of fear and hopelessness.
‘Ghost Wall’ reminds us that perfectly intelligent and capable people can be worn down by abuse to become a shadow of their former selves. In tandem with this central theme, Sarah Moss also weaves in details about Ancient Britain very vividly and powerfully. The opening scene allows us to appreciate just how pitiless some of their rituals were and the narrative throughout reminds us that the uncivilised does not lurk too far beneath the surface now. But it is not all darkness. Molly has learnt from her mother that it’s important to stand up to injustice and prejudice and she will not be cowed. This is a novel most apt for the times in which we live.
My thanks to NetGalley and Granta Publications for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

Silvie and her parents join an archaeology professor and three of his students on a field trip to Northumberland. The trip is an experiment in "experiential archaeology" in the sense that its participants try to recreate and re-enact the living conditions of the Iron Age tribes which inhabited these remote areas. The professor's intentions are innocent enough, at least at the outset - a mixture of academic curiosity and a "Boys' Own" thirst for adventure which he seems to share with his students. Silvie's dad, on the other hand, has darker motives. We soon learn that he has supremacist fantasies about "Ancient Britons", whom he considers a pure, home-grown race, untainted by foreign influences. He idolises their way of life which, albeit nasty, brutish and short, is for him a test of manly mettle. And he has a morbid fascination with the Bog People, probably Iron Age victims of human sacrifice.

At first the group dynamics make the novel feel like an episode of "Celebrity Survivors" as we feel the increasing friction between the disparate characters. However, things take a turn for the sinister when the men decide to build a "ghost wall" - a wooden barricade topped by animal skulls which the ancients apparently used as a means of psychological warfare against invading hordes.

Ghost Wall is a slender novella which packs a punch. The narrative element is tautly controlled. There's a constant sense of dread, of violence simmering beneath the surface. These leads to a terrifying climax, in which the novel skirts the folk horror genre to chilling effect.

More importantly, however, the work is a timely indictment of patriarchal and racist prejudices which, though distinct, often fuel each other. It also seems to suggest that even monsters have redeeming features which endear them to their own victims, whilst seemingly innocent persons can commit grave acts when they give in to atavistic instincts. Perhaps what make this novel so disturbing is that these horrors are all too real.

Sulevia, named after the ancient Celtic goddess, is spending the summer on an archaeological project in the wilds of Northumberland to recreate Bronze Age life. Her father is an amateur history nut and her mother seems willing to go along with the project.

So Sylvie (as she calls herself) finds herself finds herself in a field, sleeping in a tent, foraging for food and wearing scratchy tunics. She’s not happy, but she’s also not rebelling. Her family seem to be the only genuine volunteers on the project; the others – the professor and his undergraduate students – are there because the university requires it. While Sylvie’s father demands absolute adherence to authenticity, the others are rather more open to persuasion. After all, the Bronze Age people made up for their lack of modern technology through proficiency in what they did have; and who could swear that the Bronze Age communities did not have mod cons?

The story that unfolds is one of the relationship between Sylvie and her domineering father, determined to impose a value system from a bygone age on his family. Sylvie’s father demands fidelity even when the Professor is advocating a more flexible approach. And where the community does not comply with his vision, there is a price to be paid.

The story is written as an English nationalist hearkening back to a bygone age when Britons were free and pure. But there are obvious parallels with extreme adherents to world religions, demanding that the rest of the world fit in with their anachronistic belief systems. The family’s reluctance to challenge the force of the father – their willingness to embrace the privations in order to give themselves the illusion of free choice – is surely more about the modern world than it was ever about Celtic Britain. The temptations of the Seven Eleven – ice creams and hot pies – are the temptations of the West trying to seduce the faithful away from the path of virtue.

Ghost Wall is a short, very readable novel that grows in intensity with every page. Yes, the metaphors are there front and centre, but they do not take away from the very human dynamic between Sylvie, her mother and her father – three complex characters who do not neatly fit into predictable stereotypes.

I read this book in one sitting, breathless, completely terrified. The novel accomplishes much in its shortness and feels utterly real and very, very unnerving. I could feel the blazing sun, taste the unsweetened gruel and hear the ritual drums drifting through the trees. And even though I mostly identified with Molly, I could feel Silvie's terror at the thought of disobeying her father like it was my own. The dangerous mix of racism, nationalism, misogyny and unrestrained patriarchal power that lies at the heart of this book is, sadly, more than familiar in this day and age, but at least Sarah Moss, in her ending, gives us a small hope that it can be overcome.

I loved this book. And almost finished it in one sitting! So much to enjoy in such a short book. Underlying the story is one of family abuse which is deeply unnerving.

This novel may be slim, but it packs a real punch. ‘Ghost Wall’ may evoke impressions of an atmospheric, spooky tale, but it’s an unflinching portrait of the oppression wrought by an abusive parent (even when the surface of the abuse is barely scratched). The evocation of the landscape only adds to the tense claustrophobia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ghost Wall is a clever portrayal of the mob mentality effect and the utmost primitive desires of humankind, no matter how despicable. It's cleverly written and develops beautifully into a culmination of fear based manipulation. One of my favourite things about Ghost Wall was the way that nothing was explained to the reader; instead, they were brought along on the journey that Sylvie went on, through brute force and cleverly designed storytelling.
Much like Trainspotting, the novel uses literary techniques to both befuddle and engage the reader. Throwing convention out of the window, Sarah Moss's style demands attention, and the novel pays off in a huge way.

The beginning of this book is so thoroughly creepy I was hooked from the first lines. A young girl tied to a stake about to be burned to death, everyone is watching and nobody is helping her. The tone changes immediately and now you realise that you have been reading the ending and spend your time wondering how those horrific scenes will come about. Creeping menace, lots and lots of it, abound in this book.

Sil's family are spending the summer in an experimental archeology exercise in Northumberland close to the moors and near to the ruins of Hadrian's Wall. They are living life as it was in the bronze age. Wearing tunics, living in a primitive tent together, cooking over a fire and foraging for everything they eat. It is not fun at all. Sil's dad is a domineering, bully of a man. Her mum is meek and mouselike. She is beaten and submissive to her husband. Sil has become used to doing exactly what her dad requires because it is easier and she is less likely to end up with bruises. The way that Sarah Moss has written him is so good, you really feel his simmering anger! Along with Sil and her family, there are 3 university students and their professor who are living the ancient lifestyle with them as part of their studies. One of the students is a young woman who becomes close to Sil and who, partly inadvertently, leads Sil astray and into danger.

This is a small book with a great big story. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a book which would appeal to reluctant readers due to the instant entry into the action and the easy vocabulary. It is very well written and I'm going to be buying copies for school. I would recommend it for junior high school age students. Although it is set in Britain near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall I think that young people anywhere would relate to it.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for giving me access to this book.

I love Sarah Moss' writing and have read all of her books. This one could even be her best yet. 17 year old Silvie is on an experimental archaeological dig with her parents. But it's more than a dig, it's a re-enactment of what it was like to live in Iron Age Britain with all the discomforts that ensue. Her father is an amateur enthusiast (fanatic) and has somehow inveigled his way on to this dig. He is obsessed with Britishness and is a thoroughly unpleasant man. Silvie's mother is downtrodden and browbeaten and much of her and Silvie's life is taken up with trying to appease him. Things are bad enough what with not being able to wash properly, poor food and scratchy clothes but then her father becomes obsessed with re-enacting a bog sacrifice. I found this to be an incredible tense read. The tension builds up throughout until you can scarcely breathe and I was relieved when the ending came. The descriptions of life on the dig are exceptional - you really feel as though you are there and it is not hard to see parallels with extreme nationalism in Silvie's father's obsession with what it is to be really British. Thanks to NetGalley and Granta for the ARC.

This is a brilliant short novel from Sarah Moss. She puts together gender, abuse of power, class and more.
Moss' expertise in writing is very clear in this book as well. She created a complicated relationship between Sylvie and her father. The past warm memories and current situation raised the tension. Although her writing is soft and subtle, it's striking. Some parts were hard to read.

I can say it's a very good at one sitting. There's no big moves in the book, but it's quite powerful, complex and impactful. So, it's very rich but presented in a simple way.

The end was a bit quick and it could be more satisfying. But, all in all it's a masterful writing and very good read.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.