BOOK REVIEW | WE ARE ALL GHOSTS IN THE FOREST | LORRAINE WILSON

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

When the internet collapsed, it took the world with it, leaving its digital ghosts behind – and they are hungry. Former photojournalist Katerina fled the overrun cities to the relative safety of her grandmother’s village on the edge of a forest, where she lives a solitary life of herbal medicine and beekeeping.

When a wordless boy finds her in the marketplace with nothing but her name in his pocket, her curiosity won’t allow her to turn him away. But haunting his arrival are rumours of harvest failure and a rampant digital disease stirring up the ghosts, and the mood in the village starts to sour.

Accused of witchcraft, Katerina and Stefan escape into the forest, searching for his missing father and the truth behind the disease. If there is a cure, Katerina alone might find it, but first she must find the courage to trust others – because the ghosts that follow her aren’t just digital.

REVIEW

Throwing the reader into an environment that has been decimated by the collapse of the digital world, We Are All Ghosts in the Forest tells the story of Katerina, who once a photographer, has moved into her grandmother’s old house following the plague that has changed her world forever. Now she spends her time talking to bees, cultivating her crops and being the local cunning woman. 

Lorraine Wilson’s We Are All Ghosts in the Forest refuses to hold the reader’s hand and immediately plunges the reader into a world that has been decimated and lives in fear of digital ghosts and electronic infection. 

Set in Estonia, the story harks back to the paranoia of the Covid pandemic and how we all feared the spread of a disease that rampaged across the world, the setting that Wilson sets her naturalistic tale in is one that has reverted back to a pre - modern world before the age of technology. 

Gone is the stream of information that once inhabited our consciousness, with the internet now being something malignant and malevolent, spewing forth images, stories or songs that terrorise the inhabitants. 

Slowly building the story, Wilson paints a vivid picture of a world that is now dark and foreboding. Nature has become something else and is a very vivid part of the story, interlacing and interweaving with the narrative at every juncture.  Katerina, our hero regularly talks to bees to get information, and everything she does is governed by the natural world. And whilst there is the whimsical elements of nature, there are also the dark, fearful parts that haunt our dreams. Forests have returned to being dark and dangerous, and are living creatures that have incorporated the storybook darkness of fairy tales. Wolves lurk in the dark waiting to eat the unwary and the weather governs lives.

Throughout the book, Wilson creates a mesmerising tale of acceptance and kindness, as Katerina fights against prejudice at every turn. First for bringing a stranger into town in the form of a silent young boy who has mysteriously been told to seek out Katerina at a local market by his father who she has no memory of ever meeting. Secondly, for the colour of her skin, and finally for being conceived as something of a witch for abilities to cure with herbal remedies and her closeness to nature. 

With her sumptuous prose, Wilson tells a tale that whilst dystopian, is in fact very prescient to the world in which we live now, where acceptance and kindness are in short supply and the world has become one of prejudice and fear.