Kehlmann has an unusual combination of talents and ambitions-he is a playful realist, a rationalist drawn to magical games and tricky performances, a modern who likes to look backward. Despite the grimness of the surroundings and the lancing interventions of history, the novel’s tone remains light, sprightly, enterprising. Kehlmann is a gifted and sensitive storyteller. Kehlmann, a confident magician himself, plays his bright pages like cards. The result is a spellbinding memorial to the nameless souls lost in Europe’s vicious past, whose whispers are best heard in fables.” -Irina Dumitrescu, The New York Times Book Review In this exquisitely crafted novel, Kehlmann moves just as nimbly through the grimmest of human experiences. Kehlmann is a master of economical, devastating description. “Profoundly enchanting but never sentimental, Tyll is a magnificent story. **Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize** Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin Tyll displays Kehlmann’s remarkable narrative gifts and confirms the power of art in the face of the senseless brutality of history. And so begins a journey of discovery and performance for Tyll, as he travels through a continent devastated by the Thirty Years’ War and encounters along the way a hangman, a fraudulent Jesuit scholar, and the exiled King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. They find safety and companionship with a traveling performer, who teaches Tyll his trade.

When his father, a miller with a secret interest in alchemy and magic, is found out by the church, Tyll is forced to flee with the baker’s daughter, Nele. This account of the seventeenth-century vagabond performer and trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel begins when he’s a scrawny boy growing up in a quiet village.

From the internationally best-selling author of You Should Have Left, Measuring the World, and F, a transfixing retelling of the German myth of Tyll Ulenspiegel: a story about the devastation of war and a beguiling artist’s decision never to dieĭaniel Kehlmann masterfully weaves the fates of many historical figures into this enchanting work of magical realism and adventure.

Tyll book