Ghost Song

Within moments all the wolves had lifted their heads and were howling too. Their cold, cold cries rose into the darkness, each cry weaving its own way among the others, seeming to call down the black sky and nail it to the frozen earth.

Wolves scratching at the doors, wolf faces looking in at the windows; the padding of wolf feet through the snow on the roof, and wolf growls down the chimney. And, every night, the beautiful, terrifying wolf carols about the village, songs celebrating - what? The people feared to know.

The second book of the Ghost World Sequence tells of the bear-shaman, Kuzma, coming in the white night of midsummer, to demand a new-born baby as his apprentice. The baby’s father, the huntsman, Malyuta, angrily refuses to give up his son...

Thwarted, the bear-shaman takes out his anger on a family of reindeer-herders, inflicting on them a terrible curse: they will be people by daylight, but wolves at night... And in the far north, nights are a half-year long.

But as the baby, Ambrosi, grows into a man, he is haunted by the bear-shaman, who enters his dreams, demanding that he choose between the familiar homely world of his father, and the Ghost World...