Krabat & the Sorcerer's Mill

It is after New Year’s and just before Twelfth Night, and Krabat, a fourteen-year-old Wendish beggar boy, is dressed as one of the Three Kings, traveling from village to village singing “Hosanna to the Son of David!” Then one night in a dream, a faraway voice summons him to a mysterious mill. When he awakens, a strange force lures him to the mill where he becomes apprenticed to the Master. He soon discovers that the mill is actually a school for black magic and that he and the other eleven boys, the mill’s journeymen, are the Master’s prisoners. During the week they grind the grain, but on Friday nights the Master initiates them into the ancient rituals of the Art of Arts. Set against the enchanted, wooded countryside of seventeenth-century Saxony, Krabat is the wondrous story of a boy’s captive apprenticeship and his friendship and adventures with the other child prisoners, as well as a profound exploration of the nature of good and evil, freedom and power. This tension-packed thriller, based on the old Sorbian folk legend of the sorcerer’s apprentice, has won many international awards and has been adapted into two films. Otfried Preussler’s incantatory story will cast a spell on readers of all ages.

Otfried Preussler (1923–2013) was a German author of children’s books. Drafted into the army during World War II, Preussler was taken prisoner in 1944 when he was twenty-one 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 more than fifty-five languages. He was awarded the 1972 German Youth Literature Prize for Krabat.

Anthea Bell is a renowned translator of German, French, and Danish literature. 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. She has translated the works of Sigmund Freud, Sa?ha Stani?ic, and several novels by Stefan Zweig, including Confusion and Journey into the Past, both available as NYRB Classics. She lives in the United Kingdom.