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, <i>Krabat</i> 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.