Michael Ende wrote The Neverending Story in German, and Ralph Manheim translated the novel into English. His translation is accurate, graceful, and readable; Manheim has succeeded in making the English version seem as if Ende had written the novel in English.

The English translation retains the visual attractiveness of the German original. It is printed in two-color type, with red for Bastian's story, the "real" story of the book, and green for the fantasy story Bastian reads and enters.

The novel is a sophisticated alphabet book; the first sentence in each of its twenty-six chapters begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. Illustrator Roswitha Quadflieg provides ornate versions of these letters, along with illustrations of scenes, characters, and objects.

The ornate letters and the illustrations give the book the look of a medieval manuscript and emphasize the fact that the book is a fantasy.

The...