My Swordhand is Singing by Marcus Sedgwick is in the Top Ten Books For Children Who Love To Be Scared Silly. The Kiss of Death was published in paperback in April 2009, and picked up a thread from his highly acclaimed My Swordhand is Singing (winner of the 2007 Booktrust Teenage Book Award). If this book appeals to you, then you might also enjoy The Ribbajack and Other Curious Yarns by Brian Jacques.

Read our list of outstanding teenage books that either won or were shortlisted for the BookTrust Teenage Prize during it's running from 2003-10.I don't know why I was fascinated by these stories, but maybe simply because I find them to be more glamorous than contemporary stories.

This is not to say that this has less quality than the other ones - what I mean is that in this one there's more action and "entertainment" factors. He has assisted Melly Still, Tom Morris, Braham Murray, Mike Longurst and most recently Simon McBurney and Complicite for a new work at the National Thetare. Brought up among the Gentry, Jude has never felt at ease, but after a decade, Faerie has become her home despite the constant peril. Peter doesn't understand why his father has done this, nor why, all his life they've moved from place to place, or why his father carries a long battered box everywhere they go, and why he is forbidden to know its mysterious contents. Tomas and Peter are humble woodcutters, burying themselves in the woodlands outside of Chust, a small town hemmed in by the darkness of the great forest.It reads like a promising first draft to a fantasy tale with gothic leanings, but the storytelling is a bit lean in details and the pacing is both rushed and slow at the same time. And with broad and elegant strokes, he paints a chilling and irresistibly Gothic picture of the fight of good against evil. For these travellers are Vampire Slayers and Chust is a dying community - where the dead come back to wreak revenge on the living. But where 12-year-old me would have loved this, 25-year-old me would’ve liked the story to be longer: the dialogue now felt quick and clunky, and the ending was rushed.