Ghost Wall

A Southern Living Best New Book of Winter 2019; A Refinery29 Best Book of January 2019; A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at The Week, Huffington Post, Nylon, and Lit Hub; An Indie Next Pick for January 2019 “Ghost Wall has subtlety, wit, and the force of a rock to the head: an instant classic.” —Emma Donoghue, author of Room "A worthy match for 3 a.m. disquiet, a book that evoked existential dread, but contained it, beautifully, like a shipwreck in a bottle.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker A taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior The light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside. In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice? A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors.

Award-winning author Melvin Burgess's thrilling new ghost story for younger readers. David screamed and the ghostly boy opened his mouth and screamed back. But his scream wasn't the scream of a child—it was the scream of an old, old man. "Come back, come back," screamed the ghost in his cracked old voice. "Don't leave me. Don't go!" Twelve-year-old David lives with his dad in a big old apartment building called Mahogany Villas. When he discovers he can climb through the vent pipes in the building and get into other apartments and play tricks on people, he simply can't resist. His main victim is Robert Alveston, a forgetful man in his nineties who is afraid that he is losing his mind. But David's nasty pranks soon disturb more than his elderly neighbor. One day he comes face-to-face with a ghost, at first friendly but more and more terrifying as it becomes clear that he has a particular grudge against Mr Alveston. Soon both the old man and David are in great danger. "An ultimately poignant adventure that will captivate British author Burgess' fans." - Booklist

In 1638, John Lewger made a home in the wilderness of the New World, in a place called Maryland. He named his house St. John's, and for nearly eighty years, it was the center of an ambitious English plan to build a new kind of community on American soil. Men and women lived and worked within its walls. Babies were born. Last breaths drawn. St. John's walls witnessed the first stirrings of the great struggles that would dominate the continent for the next three centuries: The unimaginable wealth of the New World's crops and natural resources. The promise of religious tolerance under a new model of government. The injustice of slavery. The betrayal of native peoples. The struggle for equality between men and women. If St. John's walls could have talked, they would have spoken volumes of American history. And then the walls crumbled. One hundred years after it was built, St. John's House had been abandoned. The buildings slowly deteriorated, returning to the Maryland soil to be plowed under by generations of Maryland farmers. St. John's walls were silent for more than two centuries, little more than ghosts haunting the historical and archeological records. But they weren't lost. Not entirely. Award-winning author Sally M. Walker tells the story of how teams of scientists and historians managed to hear the ghostly echoes of St. John's House and, over the course of decades of painstaking work, made them speak their stories again.

Ghost on the Wall is the official biography of one of Liverpool Football Club's greatest ever servants: Roy Evans. Born in Bootle in 1948, Evans attracted the attention of many First Division club managers while playing for England's schoolboys team in the early 1960s. In 1964, legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly stepped in to sign him. But while the '60s were an exciting time to play for Liverpool, they were also very challenging, and Evans found it hard to break into the first team on a regular basis. Following Shankly's shock resignation in 1974, Evans was given the opportunity to become a member of the backroom staff. It was here that he really made his mark, taking the reserve team to seven Central League titles in nine years and coming of age as a coach and trainer, emerging as an invaluable member of the legendary 'Boot Room'. The decline in the club's fortunes during the 1980s meant that the resignation of manager Graeme Souness in 1994 left the incoming manager facing an exciting challenge - to return the club to its glory days. Roy Evans, 'the last of the Shankly lads', was handed his date with destiny. While the Reds did not win another League Championship under Evans' charge, neither did they finish any lower than fourth, and Evans' commitment to developing future Liverpool stars such as Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman and Michael Owen ensured that he would not become another 'ghost on the wall' at Anfield. In this engrossing account, Evans reveals the inside story of life as a member of Liverpool's famous Boot Room. He recollects his close working relationships with Reds legends from Shankly to Houllier and provides a vivid portrait of operations at the celebrated club over four action-packed decades. Finally, he discusses the challenges he faces in his new role as assistant manager of the Welsh national side and considers the way forward for Liverpool after their Champions League victory under Rafael Benítez in 2005.

A BEST BOOK OF JANUARY: O Magazine A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR in the UK: The Guardian, The Times “[Moss] writes beautifully about... souls in tumult, about people whose lives have not turned out the way they’d hoped. . .There’s little doubt, reading Moss, that you’re in the hands of a sophisticated and gifted writer." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times The acclaimed author of Ghost Wall offers a new, devastating, masterful novel of subtle menace They rarely speak to each other, but they take notice—watching from the safety of their cabins, peering into the half-lit drizzle of a Scottish summer day, making judgments from what little they know of their temporary neighbors. On the longest day of the year, the hours pass nearly imperceptibly as twelve people go from being strangers to bystanders to allies, their attention forced into action as tragedy sneaks into their lives. At daylight, a mother races up the mountain, fleeing into her precious dose of solitude. A retired man studies her return as he reminisces about the park’s better days. A young woman wonders about his politics as she sees him head for a drive with his wife, and tries to find a moment away from her attentive boyfriend. A teenage boy escapes the scrutiny of his family, braving the dark waters of the loch in a kayak. This cascade of perspective shows each wrapped up in personal concerns, unknown to each other, as they begin to notice one particular family that doesn’t seem to belong. Tensions rise, until nightfall brings an irrevocable turn. From Sarah Moss, the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall—a “riveting” (Alison Hagy, The New York Times Book Review) “sharp tale of suspense” (Margaret Tablot, The New Yorker), Summerwater is a searing exploration of our capacity for kinship and cruelty, and a gorgeous evocation of the natural world that bears eternal witness.

Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems gathers together some of the finest work by one of the foremost poets currently writing in English. Although Jamie is perhaps best known for her writing on nature, landscape, and place, Selected Poems shows the full and remarkably diverse range of her work – and why many regard her work as crucially relevant to our troubled age. No poet currently writing has a keener eye or ear; no poet has paid more careful attention to the other consciousnesses with whom we share the planet – and no poet has Jamie’s almost miraculous ability to show us just how the world might look when the human eye ceases to gaze on it. This exceptional collection of poetry, spanning several decades, allows readers to chart the development of one of our most important contemporary talents, and serves as perfect introduction to her work.

When Kral's forbidden affair with Alanya, the daughter of the king, is exposed, his people are slaughtered and their sacred crown stolen, and now Kral must use his warrior skills to destroy the enemy and reclaim the priceless Teeth of the Ice Bear.

In Victorian Cornwall, a doctor risks her marriage to fight for female asylum patients: “One of the most memorable heroines of recent fiction ” (The Times, London). Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize for Historical Fiction Ally Moberley, a recently qualified doctor, never expected to marry until she met architect Tom Cavendish. But only weeks into their marriage, Tom sets out for Japan, leaving Ally as she begins work at the Truro Asylum in Cornwall. Horrified by the brutal attitudes of male doctors and nurses toward their female patients, Ally plunges into the institutional politics of women’s mental health at a time when madness is only just being imagined as treatable. She has to contend with a longstanding tradition of permanently institutionalizing women who are deemed difficult, all the while fighting to be taken seriously in a profession dominated by men. Meanwhile, Tom is overseeing the building of lighthouses, and has a commission from a wealthy collector to bring back embroideries and woodwork. As he travels Japan in search of these enchanting objects, he begins to question the value of the life he left in England. As Ally becomes increasingly absorbed in the moral importance of her work, and Tom pursues his interests on the other side of the world, they will return to each other as different people. From the blustery coast of Western England to the landscape of Japan, Signs for Lost Children offers a “fine exploration of marriage and the complex minds of ‘lost children’—that is, all of us” (The New York Times Book Review). “Compelling . . . A quietly devastating portrait of the way identity crumbles when you’ve nothing, or no one, to pin it to.” —The Guardian