But it is soon apparent that Bill’s relationships with his wife and daughter – and his attitudes to this archaeological ‘experiment’ – are much more complex than they first seem. Silvie’s bus driver father Bill has an obsession with the period, and this is one of the reasons why the family have been invited along. The story is simply plotted: teenager Silvie and her parents spend one hot summer week on an ‘experiential archaeology’ trip with the academic Professor Slade and three students, foraging, hunting and living as an Iron Age community. Ghost Wall is a very different book, and no less compelling even if it initially requires less effort to access than McBride’s. Having recently read Eimear McBride’s extraordinary stream of consciousness novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, a book which features a damaged, vulnerable but determined protagonist, I went quickly on to Sarah Moss’s exceptional, tightly written Ghost Wall, whose main character Silvie shares many of these characteristics. But even this haphazard methodology throws up some surprises occasionally books have a curious way of following each other in a way that feels like it was planned.
I remember books I’d like to read and when I come across them – charity shop, bookshop, library – I pick them up. When it comes to reading I have no plan, just a decent memory.
‘ People don’t bother to hurt what they don’t love.‘
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