5/15/2023 0 Comments Ghost wall novel![]() ![]() Silvie’s mother Alison has to persuade her husband to allow them to wear their own underwear, brush their teeth, and even use tampons: “Women managed well enough, he said, back in the day, without spending money on all that, ends up on the beach in the end, right mucky.” ![]() In pursuit of this absurd nativist claim, Bill has dragged his wife and daughter along on the strange excursion, doggedly determined that their every activity – from communal sleeping on bunks, to wearing uncomfortable tunics, to hunting and gathering every morsel of food – be authentic to the time period. By day, Bill is a bus driver, but his hobby – more accurately an obsession – is the study of early British history and the recapturing of the experience of an “original Britishness.” Her father, Silvie describes, “wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.” Ghost Wall’s seventeen-year-old protagonist, Silvie, is spending her summer holiday with her parents in the northern English county of Northumberland where her father Bill is taking part in an Iron Age re-enactment led by an archaeology professor and three of his students. ![]() ![]() Sarah Moss’s sixth novel, Ghost Wall, is a parable for our broken times, an eerie reminder that our darkest historical moments tend to repeat themselves in the presence of fear, irrationality, and a paranoid insistence on preserving a false idea of a more perfect past. ![]()
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