This one really didn’t work for me. Mercifully, it was a short read.

Silvie and her family join an experimental anthropology class that has them spending a few weeks in the woods of northern England living as if they were in the Iron Age.

Having grown up under an oppressive father whose reasons for being drawn to the Iron Age are questionable, Silvie is accustomed to his abusiveness and antiquated views. During the two-week period, she meets an older woman, Molly, a student in the anthropology class, who challenges Silvie to question her upbringing.

As their time in the woods progresses, it becomes clearer that there’s something more ominous going on than simply Iron Age role-playing, and Silvie’s father plans a shocking re-enactment that puts Silvie’s life in danger.

It’s definitely an interesting plot, on paper, but I just didn’t find any of it all that engaging. In fact, I was quite bored by the weighty prose and the distance I felt between myself and the characters. Even the tension was tepid, tempered by a foreshadowing prologue.

Sometimes certain writing just doesn’t work for certain readers, and I think that was the case here. I’m confident there will be other readers who appreciate this more than I did.

Nicely written short novel about Silvie, a teen who, with her parents, is living as an ancient Briton. Her dad, a bus driver, has always been fascinated with the subject and now he's glommed them on to a university project. Molly, one of the students, befriends Silvie, who sorely needs a friend. This starts with a shocking scene and then moves back to the beginning of the camping. Silvie's secret spools out slowly. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. This is a fast read and would be a good YA novel. The language is gorgeous.

Honestly, you had me at Iron Age anthropology/ reenactment. This was a book filled with some excellent feminist commentary (peeing on the wall comes to mind) and the strength of women is woven throughout. I hope this author writes more books in a similar vein because I will get them all.

"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."

You've got shivers too right? I also think I need to build a ghost wall...

Atmospheric, vivid and chilling, this short work packs a punch. Moss is accomplished at quality terror and this latest is immersive as well as persuasive. Ultimately, though, it falls away. The ending is too slight and simple. Perhaps the story, which has good bones (in-joke) would have worked better at shorter length

I didn't particularly care for the writing style and the ending was not finished. I don't think I'll be reading anything else by this author. Decent premise, just was not that enjoyable to read.

**Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley in exchange of an honest review.**

This book was incredible -it surpassed all of my expectations. Moss' writing is superb and she deftly interweaves, history, literary elements, and thriller/suspense. This book has everything I hope for in a novel - I identified and cared about the characters, wanted to learn more about Iron Age Britain, and was on the edge of my seat for the nail-biter/satisfying end. I've never read anything like this slim novel and it will stay with me for a long time.

Sarah Moss' <i>Ghost Wall</i> is foremost a novel of toxic patriarchy. A boorish, prudish, and humorless father bullies and abuses his wife and Silvie, his teen daughter, and justifies himself by his consuming obsession for recreating the purity of pre-Roman Britain. Jim Slade, a clueless and spineless archeology professor, allows himself to be dominated and manipulated by Silvie’s father.

<i>Ghost Wall</i> occurs during a two week field trip as part of an undergraduate course on <i>”experimental archaeology”</i>. Professor Slade admits that <i>”after all, authenticity was impossible and not really the goal anyway, the point was to have a flavour of Iron Age life”</i>. Silvie’s father maintains his tiresome adherence to an ill-conceived idea of pre-Roman authenticity, hoping to recreate the glory days of ancient Britain before its dilution by the Romans and other invaders. The action in <i>Ghost Wall</i> occurs largely in the interstices between Sylvie’s father rigidity, the abused Sylvie and her mother, the fungible views of Professor Slade, and the relaxed attitudes of the students, just trying to comfortably live through their two week field assignment.

<i>Ghost Wall</i> is told through Silvie’s first person teen voice, which is economical, measured, and highly effective. Silvie, named for Sulevia, the ancient Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools, hovers between loyalty to her father, embarrassment for him, and fear. Silvie’s father is largely portrayed in off-hand observations and in reflections by the students. Here’s one of the students: <i>”Is he always like that, Silvie? I mean, sorry, I know he’s your dad and all but. Like what, I said, a show-off and given to brutality, yes, actually, mostly he is, sorry.”</i> In Silvie’s mind, the students are rich and disrespectful, she and her family are poor and disrespected. Here’s an interchange about Silvie’s mother’s accent: <i>”sorry, Silvie, I shouldn’t have imitated her, I just really like the way it sounds. Well, it’s not the way you sound, I said, so don’t. She touched my shoulder and I flinched. Sorry, she said again. Really, Silvie, don’t be cross. It’s OK, I said, just don’t laugh at people’s accents, you do know yours sounds weird to me, posh.”</i>

Moss is a fearsome stylist and she maintains narrative tension throughout. She sets up a difficult narrative task for herself, since she starts <i>Ghost Wall</i> by foreshadowing its climactic scene: <i>”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.”</i> Throughout <i>Ghost Wall</I>, the reader wonders not so much what happens as when will it happen and to whom. We know it happens to woman, but we don’t know which one of four women. Moss maintains an undertone of impending threat, although the exact nature of the threat is left unexpressed.

I would like to thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley in providing me with an e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 stars

Silvie Slade, a teenager from northern 1990s England, is forced to accompany her history buff father Bill and passive mother Alison on an excursion to Northumberland, living for a few weeks as Iron Age Britons once did as part of an experimental field archaeology course. Silvie's amateur historian, bus driver father idealizes Ancient Britain for all the wrong reasons - a time when supposed racial purity, patriarchal dominance and superior survivalist skills would grant him the leadership and acclaim he lacks in reality. Meanwhile, he takes out his frustration and sadistic impulses on his family, who live in terror of his violence worsening. The professor leading the course is drawn into the play-acting with the three university students tagging along growing increasingly uncomfortable or disturbingly engaged. Molly, the outspoken feminist among them, begins to realize the threat Silvie's father poses but as the tensions grow between the expedition's members, Silvie appears to be moving towards a fate similar to past sacrifices of young women by their tribes. Gorgeously lush language describes the intricate natural world that the Slades know so well as well as Silvie's growing attraction to Molly, not just for her beauty, but for her free-spirited, frank and questioning attitude towards authority. Tight oblique sentences are used to convey's Silvie's suffocating frame of mind towards her father, who represents not just physical oppression, but the tyranny of imperialism and chauvinism. Of course, any group of English strangers is going to experience class antagonism and the Slades deal with the built-in prejudices of supposedly educated Southerners towards the working-class, underprivileged North. There is much to unpack in Moss's book but driving it all is the recognition that society has always turned on its vulnerable women and children as sacrifices to whatever greater good that society - often patriarchal, dark and paranoid - demands. There are many ways and reasons to build walls and Moss forces us to recognize we are living among many kinds.
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What an atmospheric, haunting, and ultimately political read! Sarah Moss writes about teenage Silvie, whose father is obsessed with ancient British history, because he (incorrectly) envisions it as a time of racial purity, strong borders, and dominance as well as (correctly) male authority. He physically and emotionally abuses both Silvie and her passive and fearful mother, thus wielding a power he is unable to exercise in his job as a bus driver. When the family, who hails from the North of England, joins a group of university students and their professor from the South in a re-enactment of the Iron Age in Northumbria, the mentalities of the self-assured and fun-loving students clash with the grim seriousness of Silvie's choleric father, and while Silvie catches a glimpse into another world, things are slowly escalating...

It is wonderful how Moss describes the landscape and the sensations, both beautiful and terrible, people feel when they connect with or confront nature. Silvie's perspective and the way her father's abuse has shaped her worldview are utterly convincing, and the pacing is just perfect - what might happen slowly builds up, and when the revealing sentence finally comes, one still has to read it a couple of times because it is so shocking.

I think it is no coincidence that a book like this is written while England is slowly approaching Brexit, but although it is clearly a critique of an envisioned greatness in the good old times that have in reality never existed the way they are re-constructed in order to serve political or ideological goals, the mindset portrayed is not a purely British phenomenon. There are other places in which leaders are promising to make the country "great again" by aiming at abolishing gender equality, closing the borders and targeting minorities. Moss shows how this can result in a dynamic that helps to destroy the last moral taboos, and she wraps her message in a compelling story. The ghosts are not the spirits that are conjured in the ancient rituals, it's the people (in this story wearing loose tunics) who partake in the perversion of truth and science.

Cheers to Sarah and Rachel for digging up this gem of a book and pointing it out to our little book club!

For most us, the closest we get to putting ourselves into the shoes of our ancestors is by reading about them. Some people, like Silvie and her mother and the other members of an experimental archaeology class, get to experience what their ancestors’ lives were like through reenactments. And, for most of us, this kind of experience is entirely voluntary. Not so for Silvie and her mother in Sarah Moss’s haunting novella, Ghost Wall. Where the students are trying to live and Iron Age life in a patch of almost-wild wood and moor in the north of England, Silvie and her mother are there because Silvie’s abusive father is obsessed with pre-Roman Britain.

Ghost Wall does not wait to let us know that not all is right with this historical experiment. The prologue depicts a harrowing scene of a human sacrifice, based on what archaeologists and historians theorize might have happened to some of the Neolithic bog bodies that have been discovered over the years. Just at the moment the teenage girl is about to be consigned to the bog, we are whisked away to Silvie’s irritation at having to live in a dark hut, sleeping on a bag of lumps, and wearing an itchy tunic. Her father has hauled their small family along to a semester-long class where students attempt to live as people did during the Iron Age. Living this way would be challenge enough—finding food in a place where cultivation and livestock have severely damaged the biodiversity, gaps in historical knowledge, the fact that none of the history students knows how to forage—but Silvie also has to deal with her father’s explosive anger and her shame about the abuse.

The emotional tension builds unbearably as Silvie’s father grows closer to the professor who is supposed to be in charge of the reenactment. “Professor Call Me Jim” steadily cedes his authority because Silvie’s father seems to be the only person who knows how to keep the experiment going, even though the regressive gender roles and Silvie’s father’s peevishness don’t sit quite right with the good professor. The status quo might have held if Silvie’s father hadn’t started to wonder what it might be like to build a ghost wall. A ghost wall was believed to be a fence crowned with human skulls, built during pre-Roman times for protection against enemies. The men all throw themselves into the project, seducing themselves with faux mysticism. And then, Silvie’s dad suggest reenacting one more thing from the Iron Age: human sacrifice.

Throughout Ghost Wall, there are small references to Silvie’s life at home with her parents. There was a time when Silvie enjoyed romping around England’s Iron Age and Roman ruins with her father. We never learn quite what changes this relationship, but Silvie reveals her father’s growing and disturbing fascination with bog bodies and finding a “true” British past, facts be damned. This theme could have been developed more, but Moss’s focus sharpens over the course of the novella as the reenactment slowly goes off the rails. Even though there are missed opportunities, Ghost Wall is a chilling, original story and definitely engrossing. If nothing else, Ghost Wall teaches us a very important lesson: once the reenactment leaders start ordering people to put skulls up on a fence, it’s time to pack your bags and go home.

Moss provided an intriguing and engrossing work with Ghost Wall. The book causes you to look differently on the constructs of reality.

I've read so many fantastic short novels and novellas this year (On Chesil Beach, Convenience Store Woman, Tin Man) that I'm not sure why I insist on underestimating what can be accomplished in such a short page count. But the fact of the matter is, I picked up Ghost Wall without terribly high expectations, despite the fact that I'd been eager to read Sarah Moss for a while now. More fool me - this book blew me away.

It follows Silvie, a teenager from northern England whose family joins an anthropology course on an excursion to Northumberland, living for a few weeks as Iron Age Britons once did. From the very start, tensions arise between Silvie's survivalist father who idealizes ancient Britain, driven by nationalism and a yearning to belong to a society where he would be accepted, and the less stringent students who are only participating in the course for college credit. And as the line between reality and play-acting begins to blur, the constant threat of her father's violence draws ever nearer to Silvie, leading to a harrowing climax.

Not a word is out of place in this novel; Sarah Moss knows how to command language to navigate the themes of imperialism, violence, class, and gender roles that are all central to this narrative. Tension builds with unerring precision in just about every facet of this story; between the individual and their environment, between modern and primitive life, between Silvie's father and the rest of the group, and between Silvie and Molly, an older girl raised with feminist values who Silvie is drawn to, despite feeling that Molly is overly dismissive of Silvie's own rural upbringing.

I'm not sure what else to say, other than: read this book. Ghost Wall is subtle and shocking and absolutely masterful.

Thank you to Netgalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Sarah Moss for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

Silvie and her family join an anthropology course to live as ancient Britons did during the Iron Age, a passion of her father's. Though they are living out in the forest in Northumberland, the narrator's voice gives the reader a sense of claustrophobia. It is a book about breaking the restraints of the past, about how even one voice can effect the greatest change even when being quiet seems easiest and the outcome seems inevitable. It's about not letting history or stereotypes or gender roles or fear of the unknown hold you back from the future you envision for yourself. The writing is eerie and beautiful, without the use of quotation marks. It reads like the entire book is a quote; like Silvie is telling you the whole story herself. Ghost Wall is a unique and short story packed with a punch in the face of the patriarchy.

This is a novella that tells the story of a family through their short lived adventure in an iron Age recreation site. Silvie's dad is an armchair archaeologist, who goads his family into doing everything he tells them to--his family is his wife and 17 year old daughter. He decided they'll take part in an iron Age recreation sponsored by the university, and Silvie suddenly finds herself with other young people, and also begins to see herself differently from the person her father wants her to be. Moss's storytelling skills are superb. I was completely caught up in the drama of what was going to happen next.

Ugh, this was a huge disappointment. First, the writing style wasn't for me--the dialogue wasn't set off by either punctuation or any kind of separation at all, so it felt like all the text was just jumbled together. For me, that didn't make for a super pleasant reading experience, and I didn't like the way it flowed.

But worst of all, almost nothing happened, and for a short book this felt extremely long. <i>Ghost Wall</i> is told in first-person POV by Silvie, a teenager who is participating in a two week course on living the way Iron Age Britons did. It's mainly for archaeology students and is led by their professor, but Silvie and her family are tagging along because Silvie's dad is obsessed with ancient people and the way they did things. Her dad is also abusive and angry and is hell-bent on making sure everyone does everything as authentically as possible, which the college students aren't too serious about. Silvie's mom is passive and can't stand up for herself or Silvie.

The whole time, I kept waiting for a sense of eeriness and dread to start slowly creeping into the story, but I kept waiting and waiting and at 90% it still hadn't happened. Mostly there was a lot of foraging and cooking and Silvie trying not to make her dad angry. The last 10% got a bit creepy, but not to a degree that would make up for how boring the rest of the book was.

This is a well told exploration of the domineering and abusive relationships at work in a family as they spend their summer holiday participating in an experimental archaeological project by spending two weeks living in an iron age hut. There are some great descriptions of landscape and the natural world in the narrative and the sense of dread is present throughout the book, but I found the prose a little stilted in places and was disappointed that the connections between the past and present weren't more fully demonstrated. Some of the characterisation was absolutely pitch perfect and yet others felt a little one dimensional. All in all, I thought this was a bit disjointed and uneven in places, with some standout moments mixed with some rather bland ones.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

It's about 17 year-old Silvie, her mother and her abusive and controlling father, participating in an reenactment of the Iron Age in a camp in Northumberland, England.

This is a quiet, atmospheric and dark novel(la). Its narrative is long, descriptive, demands attention, but utterly compelling and powerful. I'd say, if you aren't used to the style, be patient, because it's worth it, at least for me. Once the writing sinks in, you'll find yourself sucked into Silvie's world, even though set not too long ago, it is one quite different from your own.

With Moss's skillful writing, I was taken right to the campsite and back to the days living in the marshlands. I was there with Silvie (short for Sulevia, an Ancient British goddess) as she "meandered in the evening light, feeling heather and stones under my feet, breathing the smell of leaves and dew", or when Molly and Silvie went foraging in the forest picking garlic greens and plums for dinner in the unforgiving summer heat, dressed in their coarse woolen tunic, and worn-out moccasins.

Part of their reenactment included the way food was gathered and hunted, the kinds of food they ate and how it was cooked, the place they lived in (roundhouses and tents), down to the way they were dressed, and the odd rituals that were practiced.

I loved Silvie, Molly and their friendship. Without Molly, I think Silvie's experience at the campsite would've been a dull, lonely one. She definitely wouldn't be venturing out into the city eating an ice-cream, or having conversations about dreams and ambitions. Molly, on the other hand, wouldn't be able to get a glimpse into a life different from hers. 

Silvia's dad, Bill, and Professor Slade were the worst. Bill was a bully. He was abusive, controlling and just utterly disgusting. He thought of nobody or nothing else but him and his obsession to live the Iron-Age way as authentically as possible. And Professor Slade, a pleasant professor as he was, just turned a blind eye and said/did nothing even though he knew Bill was ill-treating his family, to the extend of agreeing to do what he knew was wrong, just for the sake an experiment. 

This book left me terrified in a way that it made me shudder at the thought of how much we haven't changed from some of our primitive minds/ways of our ancestors - building 'walls' to keep out invaders, our reaction to power and violence, and the ever-existing herd mentality. Have we not progressed at all?

The ending, although some readers felt abrupt, I thought it was just right. I liked that the ending lingered. It felt more like an 'ellipses' rather than a 'period', which I liked. The absence of quotation marks though, that's what I found confusing at times when there were switching of conversations from one character to another.

I appreciated this book even more after ruminating on it for a few days. It's unforgettable.

TW: child abuse, domestic violence, animal cruelty

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a free eArc of this book in exchange for an honest review. Opinions are my own. A full review will be posted on my blog, GoodReads and shared on Twitter and Litsy, closer to publication day.

Listened to this audiobook while gardening today, and was completely blown away! This is my first Sarah Moss novel and I knew very little about it going in, having been drawn to it originally as I grew up in the region in which it is set (Northumberland 🇬🇧).

The story follows Silvie and her parents who are living in a historic archeology camp of sorts, trying to recreate the experience of life in the Iron Age. They’re accompanying a Professor and some of his students, and many of the discussions of history demonstrate the politics and tensions of who can ‘appreciate’ history and the role that class and education plays in this process.

Silvie also suffers her abusive father’s violent outbursts, and the historical re-enactment experience appears to ignite his temper even more. This was confronting and graphic, but the sensitive subject matter well written and handled by Moss.

I found this an immediately fascinating narrative, quite odd and quirky in its historical references and the ways that this group tried to capture that experience in the present day. Coupled with the personal experiences Silvie has and the direction her own narrative took, this was a really powerful and thought provoking read..

Thanks to @netgalley and @fsgbooks for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am completely underwhelmed by this book or maybe, since it seems to be getting really great reviews, I just didn't get it. I know it started it out strong and had, what seemed to me, a great premise for an intriguing story, but ultimately I was bored throughout the story and wondered what all the hype was about. I kept reading thinking I would be surprised with a great ending but I just found the ending weird and a bit unbelievable.