"Ghost Wall" by Sarah Moss

Ghost Wall is my kind of book. It was weird--really weird--without being quirky just for the sake of quirkiness. It was suspenseful and tense, but not in a painfully uncomfortable way. And it was so evocative. It was amazing the way Sarah Moss did so much with so little; the writing wasn't flowery or overly descriptive, yet with writing that was almost spare, the heat and the fear and the hunger were real.

Ghost Wall tells the story of one small group in the countryside of northern England for an Experimental Archaeology course. Events are seen through the eyes of Silvie, the 17-year-old daughter of Bill (a bus driver whose hobbies are Iron Age Britain and living off the land) and Allison (who does all the cooking for the group--over an open fire, of course). Professor Slade has three university students on the course who never seem to take things seriously enough for Bill, and all sorts of interesting dynamics develop between the seven characters. The attempt to learn what life was like for ancient Britons starts as whole-hearted for some, half-hearted or light-hearted for others, and ends up in a sharp divide.

The contrast between The Silent Patient and Ghost Wall is stark. Maybe reading them back-to-back made the former seem worse and the latter seem better by comparison, but it's clear to me that I would have preferred Ghost Wall no matter when I read the one in relation to the other.

Overall, this book was a treat to read and it's a book I want to keep. I'd be happy to re-read it again someday; it doesn't hurt that it's super-short and can be read in just a few hours.