The Spook's Apprentice

The Spook's Apprentice is a dark fantasy novel for children by Joseph Delaney, first published in 2004. In the United States it appeared as The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch, and it is the first book of the Wardstone Chronicles.

Thomas Ward is the seventh son of a seventh son, which in the County, an imagined district based on Lancashire, means that he can see ghosts, boggarts, ghasts and witches. His parents apprentice him to John Gregory, the Spook, whose work is to travel the county dealing with the creatures that other people would rather pretend were not there.

Gregory has lost twenty-nine apprentices already, some of whom ran away and some of whom did not survive, and Tom is the last of the candidates. The novel follows his education under a master who is not gentle with him, and it was later adapted into a play, a French graphic novel and the film Seventh Son. The book has sold more than three million copies, and it won the Sefton Book Award and the Hampshire Book Award.