Ghost Wall

Ghost Wall is a 2018 novel by Sarah Moss, published by Granta Books. The title comes from the barrier the group builds as part of the exercise.

Silvie and her family join an anthropology course for two weeks, the length of her father's holiday, and live as Iron Age Britons in a landscape of birch and rowan, eating stew made from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are there for their coursework. Silvie's father is there because he has been building towards it for years, and he has raised his daughter on stories of early man, taken her to see rare artefacts and told her repeatedly about the rituals and sacrifices made to the bog.

The book's tension comes from that contrast between an academic exercise and a private fixation, and from what mixing with the students allows Silvie to see and imagine as an alternative to the life she has been given. Moss writes short novels with closely controlled narrators, and this one stays inside Silvie's perspective, which means the reader registers the danger of her situation through what she does not permit herself to say directly.