I squatted for a little while on the bank and listened to the sounds of the night, no birds now but the stream hurrying over stones it had worn to roundness, small lives rustling somewhere within reach, a distant owl and a nearer response.” Everywhere, something is being withheld: Sylvie and her mother’s embattled acceptance of her father’s capacity for violence his own difficulty in disguising his discomfort and anger at the class differential within their small group the sun-beaten landscape itself, refusing to yield easily its stores of food, self-sufficient in its own variousness: “I saw a bog myrtle bush leaning over the water downstream, pewter leaved, and picked my way towards it, rubbed a leaf between my fingers and inhaled the scent of eucalyptus and sandalwood.

Over a staggeringly short distance – the novel runs to just over a generously typeset 150 pages – Moss creates and manipulates an atmosphere of extreme tension. There are the students and their professor, and then there is our narrator, the teenage Sylvie, there because her father is a prehistory superfan, a bus driver who spends his spare time walking the moors around Burnley and poring over history books in the evenings – so intently that Sylvie’s mother, drafted into the expedition to be chief cook and bottle-washer, may not even watch the television. There are tweaks – Ordnance Survey maps stand in for prehistoric foragers’ knowledge, and women and girls wear bras and knickers under their scratchy tunics – but they give it a good go: nothing to eat unless you catch or gather it, no clock but the sun, enforced cooperation.īut not all of the would-be “experiential archaeologists” are equal. It is some time in the recent past – before the advent of mobile phones and social media, but after the invention of CCTV and with the fall of the Berlin Wall still fresh in the mind – and a group has gathered in Northumberland to mount an experiment in iron age living. Here, Moss is again drawn to an adolescent female body, and although this time it is robust, its vulnerabilities and ambiguities provide ample opportunity for her to explore the fragile lines between inner and outer selves, function and dysfunction.

S arah Moss is fascinated by bodies and isolation, and by bodies in isolation her last novel, the extraordinary Tidal Zone, portrayed the effects on a family when its teenage daughter is felled by a sudden, acute physical malfunction that she survives, but which may recur, with potentially fatal effect, at any time.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss