Sabriel

About Sabriel

Sabriel is the first epic fantasy novel in Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series and one of the most influential young adult fantasy novels of the 1990s—a book that helped define the genre's possibilities for a generation of readers. When her father, Abhorsen, sends a message from the realm of Death itself, eighteen-year-old Sabriel leaves her school in the safe, modern country of Ancelstierre and crosses the Wall into the Old Kingdom—a land where magic is real and the dead do not stay dead. Armed with her father's bells, each one capable of controlling a different shade of the dead, she ventures into a world she barely knows in search of a father she has never truly understood. Her guide is a mysterious cat-creature named Mogget who has served the Abhorsens for centuries and whose motives are never entirely clear. What follows is a quest of extraordinary economy—tight, dark, and deeply imaginative—through a world where necromancy is both weapon and calling. Nix writes with remarkable elegance, and Sabriel herself is one of fantasy's great heroines: determined, lonely, and fiercely competent. Sabriel is a classic of the genre that holds up beautifully decades after publication, essential reading for any fan of epic fantasy.

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