Alyson Hagy, The New York Times Book Review

It begins weirdly, ends badly and I loved it.' 'A slim novel about an iron age-obsessed man who takes his wife and daughter on a re-enaction holiday. Ghost Wall has subtlety, wit, and the force of a rock to the head: an instant classic.” “I stayed up half the night gulping down Sarah Moss’s slim, unnervingly tense novel. New York Magazine Approval Matrix, 'Highbrow Brilliant'Ī Southern Living Best New Book of Winter 2019Ī Huffington Post Most Anticipated Book of 2019Ī Thrillist Most Anticipated Book of 2019 The New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 Honorable Mention for Best Novel of the Decade at Lit Hub What comes next but human sacrifice?Ī 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.Ī 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) When the group builds one of their 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. disquiet, a book that evoked existential dread, but contained it, beautifully, like a shipwreck in a bottle.”Ī taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior “ Ghost Wall has subtlety, wit, and the force of a rock to the head: an instant classic.” 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 book review