The Night Of Wishes

“Good confronts evil in a comic adventure spiced with rambunctious wordplay and deepened by allusions to the world’s real afflictions. Clever and highly imaginative.“ —Kirkus Reviews “A potent dose of comic fantasy, bubbling over with clever wordplay and slapstick incidents, and spiked with verse.“ —Publishers Weekly“Envy the parents who get to read it aloud at bedtime, facing the challenge of voicing larger-than-life characters…Ende revels in zany details and little asides. The tone of amused horror is well sustained in this playful translation…Amid the gags comes meaning, particularly when a cat arrives at a new understanding of his life, and when we witness the destruction of nature. It all ends in an operatic aria. And why not? Michael Ende also likes to keep his readers thinking.” —Eileen Battersby, TLS

Michael Ende (1929-1995) was born into an artistic family in Bavaria, Germany. As a young man during the Second World War, he joined the anti-Nazi resistance rather than enlist in the army, as his teenage classmates were then being required to do. After the war, he finished high school and enrolled in drama school, hoping for a career as a playwright and actor. For the next few years he worked in regional theater and wrote plays and cabaret scripts. He also met his future wife, the actor Ingeborg Hoffmann. Ende found surprise success with the 1960 publication of his first children’s book, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver. He would go on to write many plays, essays, poems, and books-including Momo (1973) and The Neverending Story (1979)-which have been translated into more than forty languages and sold millions of copies around the world. He lived with his first wife in Italy for sixteen years until her death, and traveled extensively in Japan with his second wife, Mariko Sato, who was also his Japanese translator.