Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Cas Lowood is no ordinary teenage boy, with his mother he moves from town to town locating and dispatching the restless dead.  Usually ghosts cannot hurt people but these ghosts are an exception, more than touch they can kill.  Cas comes to Thunder Bay, Ontario to confront the most famous of these creatures, the spirit of a girl called Anna who has killed anyone who stepped into her home.  But as Cas begins yet another high school and encounters Anna after being trapped in her house by the local jocks she fails, for the first time, to kill.  Cas is drawn into the reasons why Anna is where and what she is, and the mystery of the creature that killed his own father and passed the role of ghost killer on to him.

A good fast read, about teenage concerns as well as supernatural ones, starting a new school, being an outsider. 

Kit's Wilderness by David Almond

When 13 year old Christopher, known as Kit, Watson, comes to live in the ex mining town of Stoneygate he is coming to a land where his roots run deep. His paternal grandmother has died and he and his parents have relocated from Newcastle to take care of his elderly grandfather. As he comes to terms with life in a small village his grandfather shows him the local landmarks, where the mines lie under the ground leaving hollows and humps scarring the landscape.   He tells him tales of the pits and his time working there, of the ghost known as Silky, a benign spirit who haunted the mines, of the ponies and children sent to work and die and lost beneath the earth.

As Kit adjusts to life as the new boy at school and is befriended by the volatile charmingly wild Allie he watches the village children play in the Wilderness, an area of wasteland with a collapsed pit entrance at its heart.  He is approached by John Askew, a morose dark haired boy who challenges him to undertake a frightening game.  Known as Death Askew only invites the children of the oldest families of the village to play, it is a game that establishes a deep bond between two boys of the same age but with such different upbringings. As Kit's grandfather takes Kit to see the monument in the church graveyard to children lost in Stoneygate's 1821 mining diaster he reads off his own name, that of Askew and relects on the ghosts that he is beginning to see around him.

But now with the waning of the year Kit's grandfather begins to slip away from the family, little by little disappearing into a blankness from which he is slower and slower to return. As Stoneygate dips towards midwinter Kit's relationships with Askew and Allie come to a head beneath the earth.

A wonderfully moving book, Almond at his best telling a deceptively simple compelling story. By telling it from Kit's point of view, a boy who is a natural storyteller with a vivid imagination, we are given an unreliable narrator, that is, we can't be sure if what he says is true, but it becomes clear that the concept of 'truth' does not matter. Almond has woven a masterful narrative about the power of stories, of ghosts and the power of the past and a the ability of place and history to reach out and affect the present.

The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry

The extraordinary story of two girls, Alice, youngest daughter of a member of the colonial Hong Kong British government and the wife who only wanted to provide her husband with her son, and the girl who haunts her, the ghost of Lin Shui, a young virgin raped and murdered by a Japanese occupying solider during World War II 20 years earlier.  Alice is a ghost to her own family, unwanted by her mother, adored by her father, largely absent and unable to protect her from the increasing hostilities of her sisters and mother, and held accountable for the action of Lin who is drawn to Alice's life force and loneliness and moves and destroys objects around her as a misplaced act of affection.  As colonial rule in Hong Kong is rent asunder by civil unrest and Alice and her family are exiled to England, a country that has never been home to them, Alice's entourage is swollen by further restless spirits.  Berry handles the entire narrative beautifully, even Alice's monstrous mother is comprehendable in her own pain and reasons for the mental and physical torture she deals out to Alice, an amazing book of aching sadness.

Ghosting by Keith Gray (AUDIO)

Sandy is a lovely fey looking medium assisted by her teenage brother Nate who narrates the story. But they are fakes, taking people's money for pretending to contact the other side and bring messages to the bereaved. But then when visiting one man's home Sandy comes across the real thing, ghosts of victims desperate to make contact. A story of terrifying retribution.

I heard this as an audio book and it is very short, it is a Barrington Stoke book, made for people with dyslexia who would have problems focussing on a longer text. As such it is really a short story, but the best kind of its kind, a ghost story that lingers in the mind and sends chills up the spine.

Breathe: A Ghost Story by Cliff McNeish

Enthralling story, on the one hand a supernatural thriller about ghosts unnaturally trapped in the new home of a young boy who has just lost his father, but also about recovery from grief and parallels between the suffocation of loss, paranormal experience and asthma. Skilfully written and moving

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

A sad, moving book quite different from her usual gripping courtroom dramas. A bit like Shymalan's Unbreakable in that superheroes, the people who cannot be hurt, are not always like Superman, and that the past does not let go of the present. About ghosts, haunting, native american rights to land and the American eugenics movement that gave Hitler ideas about ethnic cleansing, and untimately about love and nature of suicide not as an escape but as a running to..