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.

Silvie has to spend her holiday with her parents at an archaeological experience camp. Her father and a professor spend the days boosting each other's egos and 'playing at Iron Age'. The students and Silvie have to forage whilst Silvie's mother is expected to create filling meals for everyone out of non-existent ingredients.

Bill, the father, is a frustrated by his job as a bus driver, his failure in education and his lack of status in the history world. He takes out his anger on his wife and child, beating them both.

As the camp progresses the reenactment ideas become more crazy but Silvie is too scared to say no.

It is a frightening tale, from the early descriptions of the bog woman's sacrifice to the modern day climax. Whilst this a short book I was grateful that the author did not over-egg the descriptions of the camp lifestyle and gave a satisfying, realistic ending.

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.

I loved The Tidal Zone so much that I added every single one of Sarah Moss’ books to my TBR. I still haven’t actually gotten my hands on any of them so when I saw Ghost Wall on netgalley I was really excited and requested it immediately. Ghost Wall follows Silvie, a 17 year old girl (who I initially thought was around 12, not really sure where I got that impression from) and her family, who are all staying at a camp in Northumberland focused on re-enacting life in the Iron Age. It quickly becomes evident that Silvie’s father is abusive to both Silvie and her mother and his obsession with the re-enactment combines with it to take things to dangerous extremes. Unlike The Tidal Zone I didn’t find the characters very relatable and I found it hard to care, had it not been as short as it was I would have DNFd it.

**Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book through netgalley in exchange for an honest review

The blurb reeled me in. It’s tough luck if your Dad is a re-enactment nut for how Iron Age people lived, but Sylvie’s (Sulevia) Dad is something far worse. A cruel bully and tyrant whom Sylvie and her mother are terrified of. A “practical archaeology” field trip gone beyond hunting/gathering/foraging. The “Ghost Wall” only makes a brief appearance in the last third of the book and does not really add to the story.
It is a small book, but it probably should have been a short story.

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
More of a short story or novella with its length at 160 pages, this book conveys a lot without actually saying that much.
It’s the story of Silvie and her family, made up of her history buff (sadistic) father and subservient (beaten down) mother. The three of them are recreating the past in an archaeological experiment along with some less than enthusiastic students. This is a tale about control and abuse and makes for a tense read but overall the story itself needs fleshing out more and could have done with those extra pages.

2.5

There just wasn't enough tension in this book for me.
You could see where it was building up to... there were mentions of abuse,threats of temper and actual violence... but as a whole the story led me nowhere.

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.

I really did not enjoy this book. Many years ago, I read Night Waking by the same author, and I absolutely loved it. It is possibly the best book I have read, portraying that phase of early motherhood, when you loose a sense of who you are. I was really excited to see this new book was available to request. While the writing was beautiful, (I particularly enjoyed the nature writing) I really disliked this story. It felt disturbed and very uncomfortable after reading it. I would not recommend it. Equally, I will not be tweeting about it, nor will I review it on my blog. It just wasn't for me.

When I started reading Ghost Wall, the forthcoming novel from Sarah Moss about a group of people setting up camp close to Hadrian’s Wall as an exercise in experiential archaeology, I surmised from the demeanour of Silvie, its protagonist (and narrator), she was far younger than her actual age. I took her to be a precocious eleven, possibly twelve-year-old, only to discover after reading for some time she was in fact seventeen. The reason for my misjudgement was partly her father, Bill’s behaviour towards her, since he treated her like a little girl, but also because she complied with his every wish in a most un-teenage-like way.

Bill Hampton is a bus driver from Burnley with an all consuming interest in the lives of Ancient Britons and an enormous grudge against those he perceives as belonging to a higher or more educated class than his own. His depth of knowledge about living off the land has gained him a reputation among academics as being a handy amateur to have on call, and has led to him being invited, along his wife and daughter, to spend a short period living in a remote, authentically recreated Iron-Age village in Northumberland.

The family share the experience with Professor (“call me Jim”) Slade and the students responsible for building the village and making the scratchy tunics and crude moccasins they now must wear. Silvie is immediately attracted to the only female student in the group, a confident, prepossessing individual called Molly, who seeks to educate (some might say ‘lead astray’) her slightly younger friend.

At Bill’s insistence, Silvie (short for Sulevia) and her mum, Alison, move with him into a great open-plan roundhouse, sleeping on lumpy handmade bunks, while the others – much to his chagrin – opt to pitch their waterproof tents around the place. Bill is a stickler for authenticity and detests anything that reminds him of the modern world. His list of dislikes also include women’s “undies”, footling about “like an old woman” and female sanitary products (which, he says, women managed “well enough without back in the day”). It is probably an understatement to suggest that women in general make Bill feel queasy.

It becomes apparent fairly early in the novel that Bill is both bigot and bully, though he skilfully conceals the results of the rough treatment he deals out to his wife and daughter from others in the camp. Alison tells Silvie her father can’t help his behaviour, that he’s always had a bad temper, and advises her to simply do as he says. She certainly tries to keep him happy, but she’s a bright young woman and forgets herself by “answering him back” (i.e., makes perfectly sensible comments and suggestions).

As Bill’s conduct becomes ever more obsessional and domineering, Molly begins to see that all is not well with the Hampton’s. Then events come to a head when a re-enactment of a sacrificial ritual is taken too far.
In her Acknowledgements, Sarah Moss reveals that the genesis of this story came firstly from participating in a Northumbrian residency to celebrate the Hexham Literary Festival, and then from the ‘Scotland’s People’ exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland, where she spent time with “the possessions and bodies of Iron and Bronze Age residents of the borderlands.”

Moss’s slender novel, which I devoured in one sitting, is menacing and brutal, but also filled with yearning, sensuality and hope. It has much to say about female affinity and friendship.

<I><blockquote>Because they are men, I thought, because they're in charge, because there will be consequences if you don't. I didn't see how she could not know that.</I></blockquote>
A short, almost impressionist piece of writing in which Moss swirls together strands about gender, class, prejudicial nationalism and a kind of atavistic mentality that foreground both the use and abuse of power.

The writing is subtle and loaded, the tension rising with the heat and the increasing violence as rabbits are skinned for food, their heads boiled for the construction of the menacing ghost wall.

The lord-of-the-flies-alike ending is both flagged from the start but also not quite believable - and leaves us a little stranded as the piece ends abruptly.

Nevertheless, the control in the writing is striking, and Moss has created a nicely complicated relationship in that between Sylvie and her father: her memories of their closeness when she was a child, the security of holding his hand, offering both a stark contrast and key to their present tension.

Best read in a single sitting, this is a stark and powerful pieces of writing alive to small movements, moments of complicity and rebellions, and the consequences that ensue.

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 intriguing yet ultimately unsatisfying, skilfully setting up an air of mystery about the motivations of a group recreating how early Britons would have lived in the Northumbrian countryside. The prologue is powerful, but for me nothing after matches it. The sense of abusive power in a family is clear but not interestingly played out.
I was relieved it was short, I suspect I wouldn’t have read to the end otherwise.

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.

Teenaged Silvie and her parents join a group of university students and their professor for some experiential archaeology on the wild Northumberland moors. They plan to recreate the day-to-day living conditions of the people who were there in ancient times - hunting and gathering to survive, but also becoming interested in old beliefs and rituals. Of them all, Silvie’s father is the most invested in ‘keeping it real’ and bullies his wife and daughter into complying with his ideas of how it would have been. The group soon starts to divide along gender lines, the women weaving, gathering and cooking, the men beating drums and wielding knives. Sarah Moss has done a great job with this story - on the one hand giving a snapshot of how a society creates imbalances amongst its members, dominance and fundamentalism, on the other a very intimate story of an unhappy family and a young girl straining to grow up and away from it. I have long been a fan of her writing, how she evokes a beautiful but threatening landscape and atmosphere, and this very short novel is a perfect showcase for her skills.

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.

A tricky book to review for me. I had the feeling throughout that I was the only one at the party who hadn't been given the memo of what was going on. I'd read the blurb and premise but overall, I just couldn't get into it. Everything was a bit too vague for me from the setting (Northumberland but could be anywhere) and the motivations of the characters. The writing is poetic but got really dark and uncomfortable at times. It's a short read but I felt lost in that forest and as there's no speech marks nor timeline as such, I felt even more adrift. This was probably the whole point of the novel and it's just me. The premise was interesting and the relationships which develop and fester throughout are fascinating and nicely drawn. I might try this one again later on. Once I read a few reviews and get the memo for the party .

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.

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.