Sarah Moss
Author of Ghost Wall
About the Author
Sarah Moss is a lecturer in English at the University of Kent.
Works by Sarah Moss
Associated Works
These Our Monsters: The English Heritage Collection of Short Stories (2019) — Contributor — 19 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1975
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland, UK
- Places of residence
- Warwickshire, England, UK
Dublin, Ireland - Occupations
- Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Warwick
senior lecturer at the University of Kent from 2004 – 2009
Senior Lecturer in Literature and Place at Exeter University’s Cornwall Campus - Organizations
- University of Exeter
University of Reykjavik
University of Kent
University of Warwick - Short biography
- Sarah Moss was educated at Oxford University and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. She is the author of two novels; Cold Earth (Granta 2010), and Night Waking (Granta 2012), which was selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, and the co-author of Chocolate: A Global History. She spent 2009-10 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Reykjavik, and wrote an account of her time there in Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (Granta 2012).
Members
Reviews
An abusive husband/father takes his family along with a college class of archaeology students on a summer reenactment trip, during which they will all live as closely to the way the ancient peoples of northern Britain lived. The professor leading the class slowly gets sucked into the father’s obsession with recreating a human sacrifice ritual, and the narrator – a teen girl and the daughter of the family man – is at the heart of the reenactment.
This one’s short but also sort of a slow burn. The tension is built up really nicely, and although I’m not sure I’d really call this a full-on horror novel, it’s definitely got a good creep factor to it.… (more)
This one’s short but also sort of a slow burn. The tension is built up really nicely, and although I’m not sure I’d really call this a full-on horror novel, it’s definitely got a good creep factor to it.… (more)
Summerwater tells the story of a group of families spending their holidays in a cabin park by a Scottish loch.
Each chapter is written from the point of view of one individual from each cabin, except for one (there is a big reason for that).
There is almost no interaction between these people outside their cabins and the holidays are seemingly ruined by the constant rain. The gloomy mood is echoed by the characters who reflect on their lives in a stream-of-consciousness style, often with a dark sense of humour or very intimate, lyrical observations.
Each chapter gives us a piece of the puzzle before the main event takes place.
Some chapters are interludes about the natural world. These were beautiful.
“The woods expand, settle down for the night, offer a little more shelter to those that need it. Trees sleep, more or less. Maybe some nights they dream and wake, check the darkness, sleep again till dawn.”
Along the way, we catch little details, hints at Brexit, the climate crisis, the future full of uncertainty.
Summerwater reflects the spirit of times similar to the way Ali Smith does it in her Seasonal series. Obviously, their style is very different, but I love them both for their ability to gently move our focus from the big things we can't control to the compassion and love for those perceived as "the other" that we most certainly can.… (more)
Each chapter is written from the point of view of one individual from each cabin, except for one (there is a big reason for that).
There is almost no interaction between these people outside their cabins and the holidays are seemingly ruined by the constant rain. The gloomy mood is echoed by the characters who reflect on their lives in a stream-of-consciousness style, often with a dark sense of humour or very intimate, lyrical observations.
Each chapter gives us a piece of the puzzle before the main event takes place.
Some chapters are interludes about the natural world. These were beautiful.
“The woods expand, settle down for the night, offer a little more shelter to those that need it. Trees sleep, more or less. Maybe some nights they dream and wake, check the darkness, sleep again till dawn.”
Along the way, we catch little details, hints at Brexit, the climate crisis, the future full of uncertainty.
Summerwater reflects the spirit of times similar to the way Ali Smith does it in her Seasonal series. Obviously, their style is very different, but I love them both for their ability to gently move our focus from the big things we can't control to the compassion and love for those perceived as "the other" that we most certainly can.… (more)
This book throws you a curve, at least if you don't first read some of the nicely done reviews already on here. It begins with a scene of human sacrifice in Iron Age Britain, cuts to a group of students on an archaeology course trying (not too hard, mind) to re-enact Iron Age life whilst camping outdoors near the woods in northern England, and is titled "Ghost Wall", so, I was expecting some magical realism, some supernaturalism, in line with reading this book solely on someone's recommendation who said it was "spooky".
No angry two millennium old ghosts who were victimized by human sacrifice here, though. Instead, the twin horrors of contemporary working class nativism and domestic abuse. The students and their professor have teamed up with a local bus driver, Bill, who is a self-taught ancient history buff, and who brings along his teenage daughter. He likes old history because he's wedded his identity to a romanticized vision of an original British people (white, non-Catholic, natch) from whom he descends, walking the same ground they did. There's an awkward scene near the beginning of the book where his romantic view clashes with the professor's academic one:
Naturally, the logical reasoning of the educated middle class worldview has little effect on the racialized and idealized worldview held by our white working class character, who would upend his already formed core identity and understanding of his place in the world if he accepted that his views were, factually, wrong. People don't generally care to do such a thing, of course, working class or not; psychological studies show that we rather tend to harden our pre-existing beliefs when presented evidence that they're wrong.
This reads, then, like a criticism of the people who voted for Brexit or Donald Trump, holding onto uneducated, incorrect ideas on race, tribe, and the like. We're a long way from events in the Iron Age. But then the story moves on to focus more on the domestic abuse our bus driver inflicts on his wife and daughter, an issue that as Moss nicely demonstrates lacks a class angle. The professor and one of his male students seem all too comfortable with Bill's obvious misogyny, building up to the end of the story where they literally join him in inflicting physical abuse on his daughter, knives and stones included in a miserable reenactment of the literal human sacrifice the story begins with.
Though not about what I thought it'd be about, it does build some spookiness, as you still know it's leading up to something... not good. It's well-written, fairly interesting, and a quick read, as well, though the ending is a bit undercooked, I'd say.… (more)
No angry two millennium old ghosts who were victimized by human sacrifice here, though. Instead, the twin horrors of contemporary working class nativism and domestic abuse. The students and their professor have teamed up with a local bus driver, Bill, who is a self-taught ancient history buff, and who brings along his teenage daughter. He likes old history because he's wedded his identity to a romanticized vision of an original British people (white, non-Catholic, natch) from whom he descends, walking the same ground they did. There's an awkward scene near the beginning of the book where his romantic view clashes with the professor's academic one:
The Britons had enough training that the Romans had to build the Wall, Dad said, they wouldn't have bothered with that, would they, if the British hadn't put the wind up them. Well, said the Prof, they weren't exactly British, as I said before, they wouldn't have seen themselves that way, as far as we can tell their identities were tribal. Celts, we tend to call them these days, though they wouldn't have recognized the idea, they seem to have come from Brittany and Ireland, from the west. Dad didn't like this interpretation... He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night. What about Boadicea, Dad said, she routed them an' all, didn't she. Boudicca, said the Prof, we call her Boudicca these days, it seems to be a more accurate rendition. For a while, yes, but she led the Iceni in the south, there's not much evidence that the people round here caused the Romans any major alarm, the Wall was much more of a symbol than a military necessity.
Naturally, the logical reasoning of the educated middle class worldview has little effect on the racialized and idealized worldview held by our white working class character, who would upend his already formed core identity and understanding of his place in the world if he accepted that his views were, factually, wrong. People don't generally care to do such a thing, of course, working class or not; psychological studies show that we rather tend to harden our pre-existing beliefs when presented evidence that they're wrong.
This reads, then, like a criticism of the people who voted for Brexit or Donald Trump, holding onto uneducated, incorrect ideas on race, tribe, and the like. We're a long way from events in the Iron Age. But then the story moves on to focus more on the domestic abuse our bus driver inflicts on his wife and daughter, an issue that as Moss nicely demonstrates lacks a class angle. The professor and one of his male students seem all too comfortable with Bill's obvious misogyny, building up to the end of the story where they literally join him in inflicting physical abuse on his daughter, knives and stones included in a miserable reenactment of the literal human sacrifice the story begins with.
Though not about what I thought it'd be about, it does build some spookiness, as you still know it's leading up to something... not good. It's well-written, fairly interesting, and a quick read, as well, though the ending is a bit undercooked, I'd say.… (more)
Lists
Netgalley Reads (1)
Winter Books (1)
Library ebooks (1)
Ghosts (1)
Walls (1)
Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 16
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 3,443
- Popularity
- #7,382
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 237
- ISBNs
- 138
- Languages
- 7
- Favorited
- 13
Narrated by Adam Goldschmidt, a stay at home father and part time academic who is currently writing an interactive experience of Coventry Cathedral. The story starts with Miriam's beginning in the womb and carries on until we reach the day when she stops breathing and collapses at school. We travel with him to hospital and through Miriam's stay in hospital as they fail to get answers to what happened and if it might happen again. The impact of this on the family, overwork GP wife Emma and younger daughter Rose are played out over the next 9 months. The sense of doom that overhangs the family is heavy and appears to separate them from the rest of reality, as if viewed through a glass darkly. As a historian, Adam takes comfort in the fact that this has been a state of normality for most of history, it is only since the turn of the 20th century that we have had a decrease in childhood mortality to make child death seem unusual. Amidst the doom, life does go on, it has to. Adam & Emma learn to live with, or at least stifle, the fear that their child may die, while said child behaves like a really annoying teenager (as all teenager are).
Through this Adam writes of the destruction and resurrection of Coventry Cathedral. The phases of this mirror the phases of Miriam's case, with the rebuilding standing as metaphor for the rebuilding of family life. The ending is not despairing, there is a hope for a life beyond the present, even if it retains the uncertainty that the future always holds.
I listened to this and the narrator did an excellent job with the text.… (more)