But she chafes against her father’s manifold rules for historical authenticity. Tramping over the moors there “feels as if you’re being offered on an open hand to the weather.” Silvie is alive to nature, and fascinated by the mummified bog people unearthed in that part of the country. “Ghost Wall” ’s teen-age narrator, Silvie, is spending part of a summer on an “experiential archaeology” program in rural Northumberland, where she and her parents are trying to live as much like Britons of the Iron Age as possible-wearing scratchy tunics, foraging for burdock roots, stirring god-awful porridges with wooden paddles. The novel’s feminism, though, felt utterly contemporary. The way Moss conjures up the dark magic and vestigial landscapes of ancient Britain reminded me a little of the horror movie “The Wicker Man,” from 1973, or of the music made in the sixties by groups like Fairport Convention and Pentangle. The British writer Sarah Moss’s new novel, “ Ghost Wall,” which is out this month in the U.S., compresses large and urgent themes-the dangers of nostalgic nationalism, the abuse of women and children, what is lost and gained when humans stop living in thrall to the natural world-into a short, sharp tale of suspense.

Ghost wall a novel