Ghost Wall | Granta

  • Published: 04/07/2024
  • ISBN: 9781803510194
  • Granta Books
  • 160 pages

Ghost Wall

Sarah Moss

‘Like nothing I have read before… stayed with me all summer… It deserves to [put her] on to the prize podiums.’ The Times

‘Moss has quietly… been putting out some of the most interesting and carefully sculpted novels of recent years… Ghost Wall… is her best novel yet’ Financial Times

Ghost Wall is a burnished gem of a book, brief and brilliant, and with it Moss’s star is firmly in the ascendant’ Guardian

‘…one of our very best contemporary novelists. How she hasn’t been nominated for the Man Booker Prize continues to mystify me’
The Independent

one of the finest contemporary writers working in Britain today’ Stylist

‘Is Sarah Moss the best British writer never nominated for the Booker? … as brief and unsettling as a bolt of lightning… pins us to the page with creeping menace’
Daily Mail

‘Amazing… disturbing and touching’ Maggie O’Farrell in The Times

‘An instant classic’ Emma Donoghue

‘This book ratcheted the breath out of me so skilfully, that as soon as I’d finished, the only thing I wanted was to read it again.’ Jessie Burton

Teenage Silvie and her parents are living in a hut in Northumberland as an exercise in experimental archaeology. Her father is a difficult man, obsessed with imagining and enacting the harshness of Iron Age life. Haunting Silvie’s narrative is the story of a bog girl, a young woman sacrificed by those closest to her, and the landscape both keeps and reveals the secrets of past violence and ritual as the summer builds to its harrowing climax.

Further proof that Moss is one of our very best contemporary novelists.... Ghost Wall is an intoxicating concoction; inventive, intelligent, and like no other author's work

Independent

I love this book. Ghost Wall requires you to put your life on hold while you finish it. It draws you into its unusual world and, with quiet power and menace, keeps you there until the very last page. Silvie's story isn't one you will ever forget

Maggie O'Farrell

A burnished gem... brilliant

Guardian

The Author

Sarah Moss is the author of eight novels., most recently The Fell and Summerwater. Her memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her novels include Summerwater, Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), Signs for Lost Children (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), The Tidal Zone (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and Ghost Wall, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019. She was born in Glasgow, grew up in the north of England and now lives in Ireland, where she teaches on the MFA and MA creative writing programmes at University College Dublin.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Sarah Moss on Granta.com

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‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’

Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.

Essays & Memoir | Granta 160

A Wolf in the Forest Wants

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‘I biked to the hospital anyway, because it didn’t occur to me to think of an alternative form of transport.’

Sarah Moss on her admission to hospital.

In Conversation | The Online Edition

In Conversation

Louise Kennedy & Sarah Moss

Two Ireland-based writers discussing national identity, disappointing holidays and art deco china.