Sarah Moss has been acclaimed for several years but it’s fair to say that her work hasn’t yet broken through to the large audience it deserves.  Ghost Wall might just change all that. This is an unusually powerful novel, all the more so because the aggression and violence it exposes are uncovered by a quiet, understated, and exquisite prose.

Seventeen year-old Silvie joins her parents, a group of students, and their professor at a summer camp in northern England that seeks to recreate the living conditions of Iron Age Britons.  Silvie’s father is no academic, but a bus driver, amateur historian, and enthusiastic admirer of the simpler lives of the ancients.  It becomes clear gradually that one of the features he admires particularly about Iron Age culture was its control of women, a control maintained by the physical and emotional cruelty imposed by men. Silvie’s story is book-ended by two extraordinary scenes – the opening imagining of ancient ritual sacrifice and the devastating conclusion – that capture perfectly and painfully the persistent cruelty women have suffered at the hands of men throughout history. I don’t want to make the novel sound like a tract or manifesto.  It isn’t.  It’s a sensitive evocation of an innocent young woman’s life lived under the shadow of blame and violence. Ghost Wall is an extraordinary achievement.