Field trip with father

Sarah Moss’s concise, claustrophobic sixth novel concerns the perils of family life. The narrator Silvie is a frustrated 17-year-old on holiday in the Northumbrian countryside with her father Bill, a bus driver with an insatiable interest in prehistoric Britain, and her mother Alison, who works as a cashier in a supermarket. They have joined an ‘experiential archeology’ field trip — ‘to have a flavour of Iron Age life’ — run by Professor Slade for a group of his university students.

But Silvie dislikes the scratchy tunic that she’s forced to wear and the small wooden hut she must sleep in because her father insists on authenticity. (The others, meanwhile, are in waterproof nylon tents; the professor puts on tennis socks with his moccasins to prevent blisters.) Bill refuses to add garlic to their foraged meals: ‘Hungry folk want plain food, he said, the corollary being that if you didn’t want “plain food” you weren’t hungry and so shouldn’t be eating in the first place.’