Ghost Wall

by Sarah Moss

Overview

A Southern Living Best New Book of Winter 2019; A Refinery29 Best Book of January 2019; A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at The Week, Huffington Post, Nylon, and Lit Hub; An Indie Next Pick for January 2019

“Ghost Wall has subtlety, wit, and the force of a rock to the head: an instant classic.”
—Emma Donoghue, author of Room

"A worthy match for 3 a.m. disquiet, a book that evoked existential dread, but contained it, beautifully, like a shipwreck in a bottle.”
—Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker

A taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior

The light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.

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.

For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. 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. 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.

The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?

A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374719555
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sarah Moss was educated at Oxford University and is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. Her books include the novels Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light, and Signs for Lost Children, and the memoir Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland.
Sarah Moss is the author of the novels Ripeness, The Fell, Summerwater, and Ghost Wall, and the memoir My Good Bright Wolf. These and her other books have been listed among the best of the year in The Guardian, The Times (London), Elle, and the Financial Times and selected for The New York Times Book Review’s Editors’ Choice. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was educated at the University of Oxford and now teaches at University College Dublin.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THEY BRING HER OUT. Not blindfolded, but eyes widened to the last sky, the last light. The last cold bites her fingers and her face, the stones bruise her bare feet. There will be more stones, before the end.

She stumbles. They hold her up. No need to be rough, everyone knows what is coming. From deep inside her body, from the cord in her spine and the wide blood-ways under the ribs, from the emptiness of her womb and the rising of her chest, she shakes. A body in fear. They lead the fearful body over the turf and along the track, her bare feet numb to most of the pain of rock and sharp rushes. Chanting rises, the drums sound slow, unsyncopated with the last panic of her heart. Others follow, wrapped against the cold, dark figures processing into the dusk.

On arrival, they strip her. It is easy; they have put her into a loose tunic. Against the low red light of the winter sunset, her body is white as chalk, solid against the wisps of fog and the tracery of reed. She tries to cover herself with her hands, and is not allowed. One holds her while the other binds her. Her breathing is accelerating, its condensation settling on her face. Exhaled breaths hang like spirits above each person's head, slowly dissolving into the air. The men turn her to face the crowd, they display her to her neighbours and her family, to the people who held her hands as she learnt to walk, taught her to dip her bread in the pot and wipe her lips, to weave a basket and gut a fish. She has played with the children who now peep at her from behind their mothers, has murmured prayers for them as they were being born. She has been one of them, ordinary. Her brother and sisters watch her flinch as the men take the blade, lift the pale hair on the left side of her head and cut it away. They scrape the skin bare. She doesn't look like one of them now. She shakes. They tuck the hair into the rope around her wrists.

She is whimpering, keening. The sound echoes across the marsh, sings through the bare branches of rowan and birch.

There are no surprises.

They place another rope around her neck, hold the knife up to the setting sun as it edges behind the rocks. What is necessary is on hand, the sharpened willow withies, the pile of stones, the small blades and the large. The stick for twisting the rope.

Not yet. There is an art to holding her in the place she is entering now, on the edge of the water-earth, in the time and space between life and death, too late to return to the living and not time, not yet, not for a while, to be quite dead.

DARKNESS WAS A LONG TIME coming. The fire crackled, transparent against the trees, its purpose no more, no less, than ceremonial. We had been pushed away from each other by the heat that no one wanted. Woodsmoke stung my eyes and the rock dug into my backside, the rough tunic itchy under my thighs. I slipped my foot out of its moccasin and pointed my toes towards the fire for no reason, to see how it felt. You can't be cold, my father said, though it was he who had lit the fire and insisted that we gather around it. I can, I thought, if I've a mind, but I said, no, Dad, I'm not cold. Through the flames, I could see the boys, talking to each other and drawn back almost into the trees as if they were thinking of melting into the woods and creeping off somewhere to do some boys' thing at which I would probably be more skilled. My mother sat on the stone where my father had told her to sit, tunic rucked unbecomingly above her fat white knees, staring into the flames as people do; it was boring and my father was holding us all there, bored, by force of will. Where do you think you're going, he said as I stood up. I need, I said, to pee, and he grunted and glanced towards the boys, as if the very mention of biological functions might incite their adolescent passions. Just make sure you go out of sight, he said.

Within a few days, our feet would wear a path through the trees to the stream, but that first night there was moss underfoot, squashy in the dim light, and patches of wild strawberries so ripe and red they were still visible in the dusk, as if glowing. I squatted to gather a handful and wandered on, picking them out of my palm with my lips, kissing my own hand. Bats flashed through the space between branches, mapping depth into the flat sky, their calls brushing the upper range of my hearing. It was odd to walk in the thin leather moccasins, only a layer of borrowed — stolen — skin between my feet and the sticks and stones, the damp patches and soft places of the woods. I came to the stream and squatted beside it, dipped my fingers, listened. Water over rock and peat, leaves stirring behind me and over my head, a sheep calling on the hill. Fresh dew came through my shoes. The stream tugged at my fingertips and the heather explored my legs, bare under the tunic. It was not that I didn't understand why my father loved these places, this outdoor life. It was not that I thought houses were better.

* * *

WHEN I RETURNED to the fire, my mother was kneeling at its side, not propitiating the gods but hefting slabs of green turf from a pile. Give us a hand, Sil, she said, he says if you do it right you can cover it for the night and pull the turfs off in the morning, he says that's how they always did it, them. In the old days. Yeah, I said, kneeling beside her, and I suppose he didn't say as how there was someone to show you, in the old days, how they didn't just give out instructions and bugger off. She sat back. Well, she said, but they'd have known, wouldn't they, back then, not have needed telling, you'd have learnt it at your mam's side, and don't use language like that, he'll hear you.

We were sleeping in the roundhouse, my parents and I. The students had built it earlier in the year, as part of a course on "experimental archaeology," but they had been firmly resistant to my father's view that everyone should sleep in it together. There was no reason, my father said, to think that Ancient British households had been organised like modern families, if the students wanted a real experience they should join us on the splintery bunks they had built and padded with three deerskins donated by the anachronistic local lord of the manor. Or at least, since he lived in London and certainly didn't spend his summers in Northumberland, that he had allowed someone to donate on his behalf. Professor Slade said, ah well, after all, authenticity was impossible and not really the goal anyway, the point was to have a flavour of Iron Age life and perhaps some insight into particular processes or technologies. Let the students sleep in their tents if they prefer, he said, there were almost certainly Iron Age tents also. Skin tents, Dad said, none of this fancy nylon stuff. The tent we used on our holidays was made of canvas the colour of apricots and possibly left over from the Second World War.

I had noticed that the students had pitched their inauthentic bright and waterproof nylon tents in the clearing below our hut, screened by trees and hillside from both the roundhouse and the Professor's larger tent nearer the track where he kept his car. I could sleep in one too, Dad, I said, give you and Mum some privacy, but Dad didn't want privacy, he wanted to be able to see what I was up to. Don't be daft, he said, of course you can't sleep wi' the lads, shame on you. Anyway, privacy's a fancy modern idea, exactly what we're getting away from, everyone trying to hide away and do what they want, you'll be joining in with the rest of us. I did not know what my father thought I might want to do, but he devoted considerable attention to making sure I couldn't do it.

The bunks were exactly as uncomfortable as you'd expect. I had refused to sleep wearing the scratchy tunic that my father insisted, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, to be the Ancient British nightdress as well as daywear, but even through brushed cotton pyjamas the straw-stuffed sack was prickly, smelt like a farmyard, and rustled as if there were small mammals frisking in it every time I moved. The darkness in the hut was complete, disconcerting; I lay on my back moving my hands in front of my face and saw nothing at all. My father turned, sighed, and began to snore, an irregular bovine noise that made the idea of sleep ridiculous. Mum, I whispered, Mum, you awake? Shh, she hissed back, go to sleep. I can't, I said, he's too loud, can't you give him a shove. Shh, she said, go to sleep, Silvie, close your eyes. I turned onto my side, facing the wall, and then back because it didn't feel like a good idea to have my back to the darkness. What if there were insects in the straw, ticks or fleas, what if they crawled inside my pyjamas, what if there was one now, on my foot, maybe all the way up my leg, jumping and biting and jumping, and on my back, coming through the sack, several of them, on my shoulders and my neck — Silvie, hissed Mum, stop wriggling like that and go to sleep, you're getting on my nerves summat proper. He's getting on my nerves summat proper, I said, they can probably hear him in Morbury, I don't know how you put up with it. There was a grunt, a shift. The snoring stopped and we both lay still, frozen. Pause. Maybe he's not going to breathe again, I thought, maybe that's it, the end, but then it started again, a serrated knife through cardboard.

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, they were hunters, not farmers, but there's a limit to how far we can pretend farming never happened. To some extent 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 violence pretty thoroughly messed up the idea that our experiences that summer were going to rediscover the lifeways of pre-modern hunter-gatherers. He's right, you can't reverse farming and land ownership, there's been no wilderness in Britain for centuries and, as Dad sometimes said, no real hunting for the likes of us since the Norman Conquest, but the replacement of bloodshed with sacks of barley from the whole-food shop kind of undermined the whole idea of reenactment. 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.

I turned onto my back, which was stiff, and bashed my elbow on the wooden ledge holding the straw sack. I wriggled cautiously over the splinters and stood barefoot on the bare earth, dry and dusty. There was barely enough light to see Mum's and Dad's bunks empty, the outline of the central pole disappearing into the darkness under the roof. Some of the Iron Age people kept their ancestors' half-smoked corpses up in the rafters, bound in a squatting position, peering down empty-eyed. Some of the houses had bits of dead children buried under the doorway, for luck, or for protection from something worse.

Mum was crouching at the side of the fire, blowing on the embers, a pile of turfs at her side. So it does work, I said. How did you get the turfs off without burning yourself? She took another breath, leant forward, and blew through pursed lips to the fire's glowing base. The embers brightened in the sunlight. Leaf shadows flickered. With great difficulty, she said, here, you try, it's knackering my knees like nobody's business. I went down onto my knees and elbows, hoped none of the students would come up and see my backside stuck up in the air, blew, and again. Watch your hair, said Mum. I took another breath, smelling earth and green wood. There, I said. Flames. What's for breakfast? She shook her head. Porridge, she said, well, I suppose you'd call it gruel, there's no milk and it's not oats, more like rye, I think, or let's hope not barley else it'll not be cooked this side of Christmas. Any honey, I asked; I would generally eat porridge only if it came with an equal volume of golden syrup, though Dad not so much liked it plain and heavily salted as believed in it the way other people believe in homeopathy or holy water. All this cancer, he said of Mum's newly diagnosed friend, folk need roughage, weren't never meant for all that processed muck, breakfast cereals and what have you, I'd as soon eat the box. Mum, what about dinner, I said, and tea? It'll be whatever you gather this morning, she said, maybe fish, there must be berries, this time of year. You don't, I thought, gather fish, there has to be murder done and you won't be the one doing it, Mum, but instead of saying so I put a couple more kindling sticks on the fire and one of the nice dry logs the students had chopped as part of their archaeological experience.

Mum started pushing at the big stones at the edge of the fireplace and I went to help. They need to be in far enough to balance the pot, she said, he says we'll be making a frame to hang it from later. Or a whatsit, a trivet. Out of what, I said, he's never planning on blacksmithing, is he? Smithing was one of his fascinations. He remembered, he said, the last blacksmith in the village, who gave up a few years after the war, remembered being allowed to stand in the doorway, watching the metal turn from solid to glowing liquid and back, the hiss and sudden billow of steam, the man's scarred hands. It were sacred work, he said, in the old days, fire and liquid and tempered blades. Mum shrugged. He said to use stones for now, says they're the right sort. Bring us the pot, Silvie, it's right by the door. The pot was iron, very heavy. I squatted, embraced it warmly, lifted with my knees but of course the thing was still ridiculous. Bloody hell, Mum, I said, how about a bit of toast instead, shove some sausages on sticks, but I could see from her face that I shouldn't have opened my mouth. Dad was behind me. You know fine well they didn't have toast, he said, and if I catch you sneaking off to eat rubbish there'll be trouble, is that clear? Yes, Dad, I said, sorry, only joking. Well, don't, he said, it's not funny. And go dress yourself, put your tunic on, I don't want to see those pyjamas and I certainly don't want the Professor seeing them. The Professor, I could have pointed out, was the one wearing tennis socks because he thought the moccasins might give him blisters if he didn't, but I went into the hut, rummaged in the suitcase Gran had passed on to Mum, and put on knickers and a bra before the scratchy tunic. There'd been a discussion about that in the kitchen at home, weeks back. But you'll be wanting us in our own undies, Mum had said to Dad, anyone might see anything else, those lads and our Silvie. She'd won a concession for toothbrushes too: stands to reason they didn't worry themselves with that, weren't going to live long enough to lose their teeth anyroad. And also, eventually, sanitary protection, once Dad had pointed out yet again that in the old days women weren't going around forever bleeding all over the place anyway, all those doings starting later in life when there was less to eat and everyone better for it, and then women in the family way and feeding babies the way nature intended as long as they could, which was also what he said whenever he caught me or Mum buying tampons. Women managed well enough, he said, back in the day, without spending money on all that, ends up on the beaches in the end, right mucky. Or they died, I said, in childbirth, what with the rickets and no caesareans, but you won't be wanting me pregnant, Dad, for authenticity's sake? He'd put down the list he was writing, set the pen parallel to it on the counter, and stood up, formal. Hush, said Mum, cheek, but she was too late, the slap already airborne. You court it, she'd say, you go just one step too far, what do you expect?

Whether the gruel was rye or barley, it was still resisting the actions of heat and water when the students turned up. Grains bobbled like dead maggots. Did we put too much water in, I asked Mum, isn't it meant to be going kind of gluey? You'll have to be up and about earlier than this tomorrow, you two, Dad said, folk need to eat, this won't do. I could see he wanted us to do something, speed up the heating of water and the expansion of grain. The agitation of molecules, I thought, remembering the Chemistry exam. I took the carved paddle and stirred, made the maggots swim in one direction. It wasn't fair for Dad to tell us off for oversleeping when he'd made us leave our watches at home and kept talking about the benefits of life without clocks. Folk lived by their bellies and the sun, then, weren't forever counting off the minutes, folk knew patience in the old days.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Ghost Wall"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Sarah Moss.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Begin Reading,
Acknowledgements,
A Note About the Author,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

…a compact, riveting book. Female sacrifice is never far from the center of [Moss's] concerns; she wants us to question our complicity in violence, particularly against women…[Silvie's] presence in the novel is richly physical, and through her physicality, Moss immerses us in the pleasures of nascent sexuality and adolescent independence…Ghost Wall is tautly framed by Silvie's point of view. Her conversations and interior monologues are embedded in lean, no-nonsense paragraphs. Moss is not much interested in giving Silvie and her rebellious tendencies room to breathe. This is a novel about being constrained, even trapped.

The New York Times Book Review - Alyson Hagy

A Best Book of the Year at Publishers Weekly, Elle, Thrillist, The Guardian, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Spectator, Times (UK), BookRiot, and Metro (UK)

Honorable Mention for Best Novel of the Decade at Lit Hub

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019

The New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

An Indie Next Pick for January 2019

New York Magazine Approval Matrix, "Highbrow Brilliant"

A Southern Living Best New Book of Winter 2019

A Refinery29 Best Book of January 2019

A Nylon Best Book to Read in 2019

A Huffington Post Most Anticipated Book of 2019

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Read of 2019

A Thrillist Most Anticipated Book of 2019

“I stayed up half the night gulping down Sarah Moss’s slim, unnervingly tense novel. Ghost Wall has subtlety, wit, and the force of a rock to the head: an instant classic.”

—Emma Donoghue, author of Room

"A slim novel about an iron age-obsessed man who takes his wife and daughter on a re-enaction holiday. It begins weirdly, ends badly and I loved it."

—Bernardine Evaristo, The Guardian

“A compact, riveting book.”

—Alyson Hagy, The New York Times Book Review

"[Ghost Wall] compresses large and urgent themes—the dangers of nostalgic nationalism, the abuse of women and children, what is lost and gained when humans stop living in thrall to the natural world—into a short, sharp tale of suspense. The way Moss conjures up the dark magic and vestigial landscapes of ancient Britain reminded me a little of the horror movie The Wicker Man . . . The novel’s feminism, though, felt utterly contemporary . . . I read Ghost Wall in one gulp in the middle of the night."

—Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker

“A master class in compressing an unbearable sense of dread into a book that can be read in a single horrified (and admiring) hour . . . Ghost Wall is perhaps the finest novel so far to come out of the British literary response to these uneasy times.”

—Sarah Perry, The Wall Street Journal

"[A] tiny, sharp knife of a novel . . . a persistent theme of this acutely lovely novel is the way in which all societies—whether ancient or modern, rich or poor—depend on scaffoldings of cruelty, from the meat they eat to the clothes they wear . . . Moss, whose work has long plumbed the psychological roots of timely issues, offers a beautiful corrective to the rugged, wild-man archetype. . . The whole book feel[s] like a web of shimmering connections, unshowy but endlessly complex."

—Annalisa Quinn, The Atlantic

"Stylish, cerebral... fiction of unusual philosophical and emotional density.... [Moss] is one of the most versatile and talented writers working today.... Ghost Wall [is] a riveting gut punch of a novel... It has the quality of parable, yet never loses sight of the fragile but fierce young girl at its center. It is an extraordinary novel."

—Tara K. Menon, Los Angeles Review of Books

"If you relish the creepy rituals of Ari Aster's Midsommar, read Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss . . . a twisted little exploration of familial and societal dysfunction."

—New Times Broward/Palm Beach

"Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor."

—Chicago Catholic

"Sarah Moss possesses the rare light touch when it comes to melding the uncanny with social commentary . . . Ghost Wall is such a weird and distinctive story: It could be labeled a supernatural tale, a coming-of-age chronicle, even a timely meditation on the various meanings of walls themselves. All this, packed into a beautifully written story of 130 pages. No wonder I read it twice within one week."

—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"Moss’ myth-like Ghost Wall isn’t merely a timely topical novel, but rather a timeless work of art."

—Randy Rosenthal, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Tense, poetic, and compelling.”

—Mike Doherty, The Toronto Star

“The fear produced by this fine-honed, piercing novel springs not from the superstitious customs of prehistory but from the more intimate horrors of human nature.”

—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"A fascinating, horrifying look into the way in which . . . fixation on the past threatens our present and our future . . . Moss skillfully builds an atmosphere of menace and peril, making it so that I both dreaded and couldn’t wait to turn every page, simultaneously afraid and compelled by what strange, inevitable violence lay ahead . . . Spend an afternoon reading this marvel of a book, and then spend the next few weeks thinking about nothing else."

—Kristin Iversen, Nylon

"Much like life: brief, terrifying, and obstinately weird."

—Rien Fertel, AV Club

"My Absolute Darling meets Lord of the Flies, an immersive, atavistic rager of a story."

—Tom Beer and Marion Winik, Newsday

"The tense realism of Moss’s prose, juxtaposed with the increasingly mythical movement of the text, begs the reader to question the ways in which we are willing to sacrifice ourselves, and others, in the name of preserving male supremacy. A potent, exquisitely written reminder of the how effectively a horror story can expose and reflect contemporary social concerns."

—Maryse Meijer, Publishers Weekly

"Ghost Wall’s parabolic approach is a refreshing departure from the fashionable impulse in fiction to relegate political events to the status of inert objects. As the book’s title suggests, Moss instead renders them as ghostly presences . . . Powerful and satisfying."

—Emma Hager, The Nation

"Best consumed in one potent gulp, like a shot of whiskey or even hemlock . . . the voice is original, the characters compelling, and the story as chilling as they come."

—Betty J. Cotter, Providence Journal

"Ghost Wall is a parable for our broken times, an eerie reminder that our darkest historical moments tend to repeat themselves in the presence of fear, irrationality, and a paranoid insistence on preserving a false idea of a more perfect past . . . a slip of a book, powerful in its tightly controlled prose and multiple understated themes."

—Dana Hansen, Chicago Review of Books

"A tense, provocative, explosion of a novel . . .Both mythic and intensely relevant, Ghost Wall deals with issues of sexuality, class, patriarchy and xenophobia. Think Shirley Jackson meets Margaret Atwood, with a nod to William Golding’sLord of the Flies. You can read it one sitting but you’ll think about it long afterward."

—Suzanne Tobias, KMUW

"Brilliant. Gripping. Very thought provoking. It'll take you two hours. "

—Joanna Trollope, Daily Mail

"Ghost Wall is a short and cogent book highlighting the dynamics of one family through the lens of a rather bizarre and unsettling family trip. Bringing the distant past together with issues faced by women today—most of them rooted in history themselves—Moss’ novel asks readers to consider what we might stand to gain from history, and what we must leave behind."

—Casey Jong, ZYZZYVA

“The story is exquisitely written; the characters are perfectly drawn and pop off the page . . . A triumph.”

—Leah Schnelback, Tor.com

"Remarkable, inventive . . . Sarah Moss unpacks the toxic patriarchy all without leaving the confines of a teenage girl's two-week trip to the remote northern edges of England."

—Elena Nicolaou, Refinery29

"It’s so good, and Moss is the most brilliant writer. She deserves to win all the prizes.”

—Joanna Trollope, iNews

“I love this book. Ghost Wall requires you to put your life on hold while you finish it. It draws you into its unusual world and, with quiet power and menace, keeps you there until the very last page. Silvie's story isn't one you will ever forget.”

—Maggie O’Farrell, author of I Am, I Am, I Am and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“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

“A perfectly calibrated consciousness that is energetic and lonely and prone to sharp and memorable observations . . . This is a haunting, astonishing novel.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Thought provoking on multiple levels, with insights into primitive and modern societies, and coming of age in the face of family violence.”

—Library Journal, starred review

"With stark and haunting prose that perfectly captures the harshness of the conditions the group is re-creating, Ghost Wall explores what the past can teach us about the present and what the present can teach us about the past—especially when the two are not as far removed as we may like to believe."

—Kerry McHugh, Shelf Awareness

“A novel as tightly woven as the baskets its heroine plaits, Ghost Wall is a startling and bloody blade of a book. A teenage girl, her parents, and a group of students agree to reenact life in Iron Age England over the course of a holiday, and slide into sacrifice. Elements of The Secret History combine with The Witch, plus bog bodies, patriarchal and class violence—it’s a slender, scathing fable for today, made of the ingredients of the past thousand years.”

—Maria Dahvana Headley, author of The Mere Wife

“Ghost Wall grabs you by the guts and never lets go. Dazzling."

—Elizabeth Day, author of The Party

“A thorny, thoroughly original novel about human beings' capacity for violence.”

—Kirkus

“Tackling issues such as misogyny and class divides, Moss packs a lot into her brief but powerful narrative.”

—Booklist

“A short, sharp shock of a book that closes around you like a vice as you read it . . . From the terse, dismaying little prologue, in which an iron age girl is marched out and murdered before an audience of neighbours and family, to the hair-raising, heart-stopping denouement, it hurtles along and carries you with it, before dumping you, breathless, at the end . . . Ghost Wall is a burnished gem of a book, brief and brilliant, and with it Moss’s star is firmly in the ascendant.”

—Sarah Crown, The Guardian

“The curious allure of re-enactment is cleverly explored in Moss’s short, potent novel . . . A Brexity tale to send shivers down your spine.”

—Rebecca Rose, The Financial Times

"Ghost Wall . . . is further proof that [Moss is] one of our very best contemporary novelists. How she hasn’t been nominated for the Man Booker Prize continues to mystify me – and this year is no exception . . . a gripping narrative . . . It’s an intoxicating concoction; inventive, intelligent, and like no other author’s work."

—Lucy Scholes, The Independent, Five-Star Review

"Ghost Wall, a slim but meaty book, is like nothing I have read before; its creepy atmosphere has stayed with me all summer . . . Moss combines exquisite nature writing, original characters and a cracking thriller plot to make a wonderful literary curiosity. It deserves to pull her out of the bog of underappreciation and on to the prize podiums."

—Alex O'Connell, The Times (UK)

"Stunningly good, a tightly written, powerful book about archaeology and Englishness."

—Alex Preston, The Observer

"Moss truthfully conveys the way teenage girls make friends . . . In just 149 pages Moss does a remarkable job at building an engaging, textured world and Silvie is a likeable heroine. You root for her — and she might just surprise you."

—Susannah Butter, Evening Standard

“[Sarah Moss is] this divided country’s most urgent novelist. Her themes: the cycles of history, male absurdity, the forms female subversion may take, in irony, sickness and sacrifice. It helps that she’s absurdly topical, and that she’s funny.”

—Daniel Swift, The Spectator

"Reading Ghost Wall in the context of contemporary Britain only serves to highlight the folly of wishing for the good old days . . . The book can be read as a Brexit fable, where seppuku levels of self-sacrifice are forged with lemming-like gusto . . . There is a spring-taut tension embedded in the pages . . . Moss’s brevity is admirable, her language pristine."

—Sinead Gleeson, The Irish Times

"Moss slowly ratchets up the tension, much as the Iron Age people they are studying used to slowly twist a length of rope around the necks of the human sacrifices they made, up on the nearby moors."

—Roger Cox, The Scotsman

"[Combines] the components of a thriller with a nuanced understanding of history, its fluctuating interpretations and its often traumatic effect on the present . . . Moss’s sensual writing recalls the late Helen Dunmore . . . A bold, spare study of internecine conflict."

— Catherine Taylor, New Statesman

"Characteristically intelligent . . . both subtle and devastating . . . Moss is the author of five acclaimed novels but in this short volume has, I believe, produced her best fiction to date."

—Totally Dublin

“Reading Ghost Wall is an intense experience. Its claustrophobia and fearful build up leave you feeling close to tears. It is a masterful piece of writing that cements Moss’s reputation as one of our best novelists.”

—Sian Norris, Prospect

"The 'ghost wall' of the title becomes a powerful metaphor for the invisible boundaries that exist between different groups of people, not just in the past but also at the present time. Sarah Moss combines her research interests in food, place and material culture to good effect."

—Lucy Whetman, Press Association/The Telegraph

“A masterpiece of concision . . . Whether evoking the landscape and the natural world or charting the dynamics between her strongly drawn characters, there is precision, elegance and, yes, a dark beauty.”

—Martin Spice, Star2

"Moss’s finely balanced novel combines a strong sense of the natural world with a growing atmosphere of menace, interspersed with wry humour."

—Anthony Gardner, The Mail on Sunday

“Certain to give you the chills and the creeps . . . Ghost Wall addresses issues of gender and class, British identity and borders, in 160 pages.”

– Sana Goyal, LiveMint

“Moss is the author of several unsettling and intelligent novels about women constrained by historical circumstance, and this, narrated beautifully by a teenage girl, is one of her best yet.”

—Metro

"Sarah Moss is fascinated by bodies and isolation, and by bodies in isolation . . . Here, [she] is again drawn to an adolescent female body . . . Moss appears to collapse layers of history, to render skin and knife and rope identical across millennia. What provokes and perpetuates that capacity for harm, and what powers a mystical belief in its propitiatory value, remains eerily unclear, but no less urgent a concern for us than for our ghostly forebears."

—Alex Clark, The Observer

“Is Sarah Moss the best British writer never nominated for the Booker? . . . as brief and unsettling as a bolt of lightning . . . [Ghost Wall] pins us to the page with creeping menace.”

—Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail

“Exquisite . . . the book works subcutaneously, building towards an ending that is all the more horrifying for its unexpectedness . . . an important novel that wears its timeliness lightly.”

—Financial Times

"Moss’s slight but searing Ghost Wall explores questions of class mistrust, sexism, social mobility, xenophobia, and the North-South divide"

—Leo Robson, The New Yorker

“Unnerving . . . An intense and menacing book—the sort that’s best read in one sitting.”

—Francesca Carrington, Tatler

“Sarah Moss . . . combines a poetic sensibility with great storytelling . . . Moss is brilliant on atmosphere.”

—John Boyne, Metro UK

“Succinct and sublime . . . Moss depicts the connections between the people and the landscape with wonderful and lyrical precision, not a word is wasted on the page in her supple prose, and she is also expert at revealing her characters through the tiniest act or gesture. Ghost Wall is a masterclass in the ‘less is more’ style of writing, creating unbearable tension right up to the violent climax.”

—Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

“An unsettling novella about gender, power, and control that immerses you in its dark terror and won’t let go . . . Captivating.”

—Attitude

“Writing that, along with vivid responses to the natural world and acute alertness to class, regional and sexual tensions, recalls the early fiction of DH Lawrence. It brings enriching complexity to this tale of escalating menace.”

—Peter Kamp, Sunday Times

“Moss is the author of a series of unsettling, beautifully strange novels, and her latest . . . is no exception.”

—Sarah Hughes, iNews, “50 Top Reads for Autumn”

“Outstanding . . . The threat of unchallenged authority is brilliantly exposed . . . Grave and sophisticated, lit by flashes of wry humour, this is a drama that excavates our deepest instincts.”

—Caroline Jackson, Country Life

“What I admire . . . is Moss’s ability to find an emotional connection with characters in the far distant past . . . Eerie and gripping.”

—Editor’s Choice, The Bookseller

From the Publisher

2018-10-02

A teenager and her working-class family join a group of experimental archaeologists and must face the sinister connections between their own circumstances and the brutal lives of the Iron Age inhabitants of Britain.

Seventeen-year-old Silvie's father has an unusual hobby. A bus driver by trade, her dad is an amateur expert in pre-Roman British history. He's taught Silvie how the ancient people would have lived—which roots can be eaten, which moors can be usefully foraged—and how they would have died, found preserved in bogs with ropes around their necks, hands, and feet. But his interest isn't especially benign. A violent, racist man, he reveres Iron Age Britain as a symbol of purity, believing it represents a culture before it was sullied by invaders from other lands. A local professor has invited Silvie's family to tag along on a summer archaeology course that will attempt to replicate the daily lives of the Iron Age Northumbrians. As the college students in the course get to know Silvie and get a closer look at her family dynamics—her tempestuous father, her cowed mom—Silvie is forced to both question her secret life and protect it from outsiders before the re-enactment goes too far. Moss' (Signs for Lost Children, 2017, etc.) unusual premise allows her to explore issues of class, sexuality, capitalism, and xenophobia in fewer than 150 pages. Her decision to use unformatted dialogue, without punctuation or paragraph breaks, can be frustrating and works against the plot's natural suspense, but it also shows Silvie's panic, confusion, and longing as strangers get too close. One can't help but wonder if there is a post-Brexit cautionary tale flowing not too far below the surface here.

A thorny, thoroughly original novel about human beings' capacity for violence.

Kirkus Reviews