It centers on a seventeen year old girl named Silvie, with her controlling and manipulative father and subservient mother who go on vacation to participate in an experiential archaeological re-enactment of an Iron Age British Northumbrian camp with a group of college students and a Professor, Silvie calls 'Prof'. I enjoyed the historical aspects of this novella as well as the overall story being conveyed. Ghost Wall has subtlety, wit, and the force of a rock to the head: an instant classic.” (Emma Donoghue, author of Room) “I stayed up half the night gulping down Sarah Moss’s slim, unnervingly tense novel. This book ratcheted the breath out of me so skillfully that as soon as I’d finished, the only thing I wanted was to read it again.” (Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist) Wild, calm, dark yet hopeful, a girl with a smart-mouth narrates her own difficult history as well as that of Britain. “I have never read a novel this slender that holds inside it quite so much. What comes next but human sacrifice?Ī story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’ Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors. When the group builds one of its own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind.

He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs - particularly their sacrifices to the bog. The students are fulfilling their coursework Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession.

They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. In the North of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age.įor two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. The light blinds you there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside. 2019 Publishers Weekly Best Books of the YearĢ019 The Times Literary Supplement Books of the YearĢ019 The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the YearĢ018 The Times Literary Supplement Books of the YearĢ018 The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the YearĪ taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior.

The ghost wall sarah moss