Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill

A dark thriller about a boy forcibly made apprentice to a sorcerer, set against enchanted woods and shadowy ruins.

"One of my favorite books." —Neil Gaiman

New Year’s has passed. Twelfth Night is almost here. Krabat, a fourteen-year-old beggar boy dressed up as one of the Three Kings, is traveling from village to village singing carols. One night he has a strange dream in which he is summoned by a faraway voice to go to a mysterious mill—and when he wakes he is irresistibly drawn there. At the mill he finds eleven other boys, all of them, like him, the apprentices of its Master, a powerful sorcerer, as Krabat soon discovers. During the week the boys work ceaselessly grinding grain, but on Friday nights the Master initiates them into the mysteries of the ancient Art of Arts. One day, however, the sound of church bells and of a passing girl singing an Easter hymn penetrates the boys’ prison: At last a plan is set in motion that will win them their freedom and put an end to the Master’s dark designs.

Krabat & the Sorcerer’s Mill was one of Cornelia Funke’s most beloved books as a child, and it is easy to see why. It is a wondrous story of magic, black and white; of courage and cunning; and of high adventure.

“As a full-length novel, Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill incorporates most elements of the old story, [“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,”] while establishing regional bona fides with the name and nature of its hero... At that time, a novelist could assume certain elements of background knowledge that are less likely to be known today, particularly by English-speaking children...but it is not necessary for them to appreciate the powerful themes at work here.” —Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal  

Otfried Preussler (1923 - 2013) was a German author of children's books. Drafted into the German army during World War II, Preussler was taken prisoner in 1944 when he was 21 years old and spent the next five years in POW camps in the Tatar Republic. After his release, he became a primary school teacher and began writing and publishing children's stories that would one day be translated into over 55 languages. He was awarded the 1972 German Youth Literature Prize for Krabat.

Anthea Bell (1936-2018) was the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Stefan Zweig’s Burning Secret. In 2002 she won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Her translations of Zweig’s novellas Confusion and Journey into the Past are available as NYRB Classics.

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