Everywhere in the book, people are sighing over the present. There is an art to holding her in the place she is entering now, on the edge of the water-earth, in the time and space between life and death, too late to return to the living and not time, not yet, not for a while, to be quite dead.In Sarah Moss’s new novel, “ Summerwater” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which portrays a Scottish campground during the course of a sodden August day, a character mournfully reflects that Edinburgh is full of English people “these days.” It’s a phrase that occurs repeatedly: having kids “these days” is not a very clever thing to do those who have had the misfortune of being born “these days” are given silly names like Honey. What is necessary is on hand, the sharpened willow withies, the pile of stones, the small blades and the large.

They place another rope around her neck, hold the knife up to the setting sun as it edges behind the rocks. The sound echoes across the marsh, sings through the bare branches of rowan and birch. They tuck the hair into the rope around her wrists. Her brother and sisters watch her flinch as the men take the blade, lift the pale hair on the left side of her head and cut it away. She has played with the children who now peep at her from behind their mothers, has murmured prayers for them as they were being born. They turn her to face the crowd, they display her to her neighbours and her family, to the people who held her hands as she learnt to walk, taught her to dip her bread in the pot and wipe her lips, to weave a basket and gut a fish. All of them are accompanied by their exhalations, slowly dissolving into the air. Her breathing is accelerating, its condensation settling on her face. She tries to cover herself with her hands, and is not allowed. Her body is white in the pale red light, solid against the wisps of fog and the tracery of reed. It is easy they have put her into a loose tunic. Others follow, wrapped against the cold, dark figures processing into the dusk. Chanting rises, the drums sound slow, unsyncopated with the last panic of her heart.

They lead the fearful body over the turf and along the track, her bare feet numb to most of the pain of rock and sharp rushes. From deep inside her body, from the cord in her spine and the wide blood-ways under the ribs, from the emptiness of her womb and the rising of her chest, she shakes. No need to be rough, everyone knows what is coming. The last cold bites her fingers and her face, the stones – not the last stones – bruise her bare feet. Not blindfolded, but eyes widened to the last sky, the last light. An excerpt from Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, published by Granta Books.

The ghost wall sarah moss