Pile by the Bed reviews The Fell in which Sarah Moss takes on the social impacts of the pandemic and associated lockdowns.

A pre-apocalypse, the labyrinth, an Australian drought, the US gold rush from a new perspective and an ode to our relationship with trees form Pile by the Bed’s Top 5 reads for 2020, together with six just as interesting and engaging honourable mentions.

Pile by the Bed reviews Summerwater by Sarah Moss – a series of incisive linked stories set on a single, rainy day at a Scottish holiday camp.

Pile By the Bed Top 5 Books of 2018 (+ 5 honourable mentions)

Ghost Wall, the sixth book by British author Sarah Moss, is as short and sharp as a flint knife. The book is a coming-of-age tale that explores the power of the past to inform and drive action. Along the way, Moss deeply questions the Brexit movement and gender power dynamics. Ghost Wall opens in prehistoric times, with the death of an Iron Age woman at the hands of her tribe. Cut to almost modern day, sometime not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and teenage Sylvie and her parents have joined a university project conducting an experiment in living archaeology in the Northumbrian countryside. The aim of the project is for the family, along with the professor and his three young adult students, to live as far as possible as people did in the Iron Age. As Sylvie observes: … that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves become the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do…