27: Ghost Wall

A book by Sarah Moss

I genuinely don't think there's such a thing as a bad bookshop. If there are books on the shelves and enthusiastic booksellers at the till, I'm sold. That being said, it is still possible to have a favourite bookshop. Or perhaps several. There's the local one, the massive one, the higgledy-piggledy second-hand one, and the spent-a-lot-of-time-there-as-a-student one. There's also the St Andrews one, more accurately described as Topping & Company, which has four branches across the UK. The St Andrews branch (the only one I've visited thus far) is like the Platonic ideal of a bookshop, with floor-to-ceiling shelves groaning under the weight of a vast selection that would take several lifetimes to consume. It's heavenly.

It also boasts an innovation I'd never seen before I first visited: The Literary Blind Date. It's basically a selection of newspaper-wrapped books which are labelled with a general categorisation (Ancient Historical Fiction, Short Stories, Dystopian Noir, Anti-Crime) and a brief, oblique plot synopsis. The idea being that you buy the book you like the sound of but don't actually find out what it is until you unwrap it. The bookshop itself describes it as their way of championing "books by authors who just don't get the love and attention that their talent merits". I thought it was great, and my interest was duly piqued by the Ancient Historical Fiction offering: "A collection of linked stories that could be described as Italo Calvino wrote Madeline Miller." Can you guess it?

Perversely—especially given the ludicrously convoluted introduction—even if you can guess it, it is not that book I'm writing about here. (But I will do eventually!) The book I'm writing about here is Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall from 2018 which, unless I'm very much mistaken, was another of the books available in Topping & Co's Literary Blind Date the day I visited. Wrapped in its newspaper shroud, it came under the category of Dark Novella and was given this billing: "A teenage girl participates in an unusual family holiday which leads to a dark climax. Written with beautiful prose and capturing violent human nature, this is unflinching fiction."

I couldn't have said it better myself. Quite literally. The above 350ish words were largely composed just so I had an excuse to steal that description of Ghost Wall. It is about a teenage girl (17-year-old Silvie), she does go on an unusual family holiday (her and her parents join a professor and his students on an experiential archeology trip in Northumbria where they attempt to live as much as possible like Iron Age Britons), and it leads to a dark climax so tense and horrifyingly inevitable that one's breathing comes only in snatches in the final pages.

And that's all I'm giving up on any plot or characters. Ghost Wall is a book to go into cold. At 149 pages, it is a slip of a book and definitely a down-in-oner. But while it may be brief, it is never superficial. Moss does not deal in cheap thrills. Every word is vital. To steal from Topping & Co again, Moss does write "beautiful prose". She is also a wonderful storyteller and sublime nature writer. Despite, or indeed because of, its Iron Age trappings, Ghost Wall is superbly contemporary in its politics, its feminism, and its state-of-the-nation urgency.

Ghost Wall is Sarah Moss's sixth novel—her seventh, Summerwater, was released earlier this year and has also been widely praised—but it's the first of her books I've read. As I presume is fairly evident by now, I was pretty blown away by it. To mine the blind date metaphor further, this was some introduction. Quite the thunderbolt:

You won't "settle down and be happy" with Ghost Wall. Indeed, unsettling is perhaps the best word to describe it. You will, though, be glad you read it.