Peter's life has been far from easy, travelling from town to town in the wake of his father, a drunken, rootless woodcutter. In the town of Chust they seem to have found a home, but even here Tomas manages to isolate them, building a hut on the edge of town and cutting a trench between the river's forks to make their home an island. Shunned by the villagers, all he has is his work and futile dreams of the draper's daughter, until the dead refuse to stay dead and a mysterious group of gypsies arrive. The snow draws in and the lines of an ancient battle are drawn, between light and darkness, good and evil; between ancestors and the undead hostages; between the Winter King and the Shadow Queen. Peter must decide who to trust and who to believe, must find the meaning of an old song and the strength to fight an ancient evil, before all of Chust fall prey to the darkness.

Review:  Marcus Sedgwick's new novel is set in the dark and beautiful land beyondthe forest; Transylvania of dark renown. In writing this vampire story he has gone back to source, rejecting centuries of black cloaks, widows’ peaks and 'I do not drink...wine' in favour of walking corpses with stinging tongues, foetid breath and no conversation. In doing so, he has returned to the core of the vampire myth: the fear of death and of the unnatural, an aspect which many modern stories miss by making their vampires so human that almost the only downside to undeadness is the difficulty of getting to the bank before it shuts.

 Fear of death - both explicitly and in the form of fear of stagnation or of the unknown - is at the heart of My Swordhand is Singing. The climactic battle twixt good and evil receives barely a nod in terms of page count, because the physical struggle is not important. This is not a sixteenth century Buffy the Vampire Slayer - as cool as that might be, if done well - although it tackles similar themes of youth and mortality. The true struggle is in Peter's heart, between his fear and his hopes and the lies told to him by his father.

As with many of Sedgwick's books, this novel is unsuitable for younger readers, partly in terms of the level of writing, but primarily on existential grounds. There's some heavy stuff in here and less sophisticated readers will probably be somewhat lost.

BOOKTRUST TEEANGE PRIZE 2007