Sarah Moss Books

From the author of Ghost Wall, a powerful enquiry into the workings of the human mind and heart, set in the 1880s between Japan and England.

Night Waking is a brilliantly observed comedy of 21st-century manners. It's also a tightly plotted mystery that keeps the reader wondering, and hoping, until the final page' - Louise Welch

A tightly plotted exploration of motherhood and troubled mysteries from the author of Ghost Wall.

Exploring the intersection of food, sexuality, and commerce, this book delves into late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women's fiction. It examines how food serves as both a source of pleasure and a commodity, intertwining themes of bodily and economic productivity with societal expectations. Through the lens of novels, conduct books, and popular medicine, it reveals the complex and often unsettling relationships between consumption and identity during this period, challenging established critical perspectives.

'Bodies of Light' is a deeply poignant tale of a psychologically tumultuous 19th century upbringing set in the atmospheric world of pre-Raphaelitism and the early suffrage movement. Ally (older sister of May in 'Night Waking'), is intelligent, studious and engaged in an eternal - and losing - battle to gain her mother's approval and affection. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a religious zealot, keener on feeding the poor and saving prostitutes than on embracing the challenges of motherhood. Even when Ally wins a scholarship and is accepted as one of the first female students to read medicine in London, it still doesn't seem good enough.

A poignant, funny and engrossing exploration of family life, centred around a cataclysmic event and its aftermath; from the author of Night Waking and Signs for Lost Children.

A beautiful and nuanced historical novel about maternal failures, sibling affection and the everyday savagery of family, from the author of Ghost Wall.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Summerwater and Ghost Wall 'A tense page-turner . . . I gulped The Fell down in one sitting' - Emma Donoghue 'Her work is as close to perfect as a novelist's can be' - The Times At dusk on a November evening in 2020 a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of two weeks of isolation, but she just can't take it any more - the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know. But Kate's neighbour Alice sees her leaving and Matt, Kate's son, soon realizes she's missing. And Kate, who planned only a quick solitary walk - a breath of open air - falls and badly injures herself. What began as a furtive walk has turned into a mountain-rescue operation . . . Unbearably suspenseful, witty and wise, The Fell asks probing questions about the place the world has become since March 2020, and the place it was before. This novel is a story about compassion and kindness and what we must do to survive. 'Gripping, thoughtful and revelatory' - Paula Hawkins 'This slim, intense masterpiece is one of my best books of the year' - Rachel Joyce 'One of our very best contemporary novelists' - Independent

At the height of the financial crisis in 2009, Sarah Moss and her husband moved with their two small children to Iceland. From their makeshift home among the half-finished skyscrapers of Reykjavik, Moss travels to hillsides of boiling mud and volcanic craters, and the remote farms and fishing villages of the far north. She watches the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds, and as the weeks and months go by, she and her family find new ways to live.

It is high summer in rural Northumberland. Seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents have joined an encampment run by an archaeology professor with an interest in the region's dark history of ritual sacrifice. As Silvie finds a glimpse of new freedoms with the professor's students, her relationship with her overbearing father begins to deteriorate, until the haunting rites of the past begin to bleed into the present.