It’s both breathless and indistinguishable from the other text, as though Silvie’s voice hides in plain sight, often fearful of what it articulates: wrong words, wrong tone. Moss dispenses not just with speech indicators, but runs all the dialogue into regular sentences. There is a spring-taut tension embedded in the pages, which is built up slowly by a number of means. This is the spectrum of how she regards and navigates the world, which for now, feels nothing but autocratic. Moss expertly captures the hinterland of being an older teen who is not yet an adult, splicing Silvie’s encounters with shame, curiosity, desire and fear.

Bill's sepia-tinted nationalism is a naive romanticisation, a jingoistic longing for simpler time. Reading Ghost Wall in the context of contemporary Britain only serves to highlight the folly of wishing for the good old days. In her previous work, Moss is something of a miniaturist, using a handful of characters in a compressed setting to talk about something bigger, more timeless and external than that small space. He scoffs at their waterproof tents, their inability to skin animals, and bears a particular animosity towards Molly, a young woman who challenges him. He is a clever amateur historian a bus-driver with a brick-sized shoulder chip about his lack of education, compared to the middle-class students who are also taking part in the camp. The bed, the borderline starvation and the wearing of prehistoric tunics are all part of a quest for authenticity, but it becomes quickly apparent that Bill’s views – on politics, women and power – are also relics. Along with a university professor and three students, they are there to live immersively in the past, recreating life in the Iron Age. That is, when she manages to sleep, given that her nights are spent in a rudimentary bed, handmade by her tyrannical father Bill, who has brought Silvie and her mother on an experimental archaeology trip.

In her previous work, she moved easily from Victorian Manchester to 19th century Japan, and while the nightmare prologue of Ghost Wall may be historical, it haunts the present-day dreams of a teenage girl called Silvie. It's no surprise that the sod-turning opening of Sarah Moss's sixth novel begins in the past. An acceptance of the ways of ritual sacrifice of the lure of a bountiful harvest, the necessity of offering something to the land.

All of this happens, not just with the acquiescence of her family and neighbours, but with their encouragement. No need to be rough, everyone knows what is coming.”Ī girl is bound, frightened and about to be cast into a bog.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss