Books by Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones (1934- 2011) was a British novelist, best known for her fantasy novels for young adults and cozy fantasy books. Many have been recommended on Five Books
“I could’ve picked pretty much any Diana Wynne Jones novel. Diana is magnificent author… Archer’s Goon is set in a city very much like Bristol, where she lived. The father is a university professor, just as Diana’s husband Charlie was a university professor. The novel itself involves seven strange entities or demigods who are bound to this town. They cannot leave, although they want to, and they each control a specific thing that happens in the town: crime, perhaps, or technology. One of them, we learn, lives, literally, in the past. A young boy gets to the bottom of what’s going on. It’s a complicated story, as much written for adults as for kids.” Read more...
Neil Gaiman, Novelist
“It is intricate. It is beautiful. Diana Wynne-Jones, as a writer, was incredibly fond of things that recontextualized everything. She included a conceit in Fire and Hemlock of these vases which would rotate when you pulled a lever: sometimes they would say ‘now here,’ but if you got them at exactly the right angle, they would say ‘nowhere.’ And that blew my mind as a nine-year-old; that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.” Read more...
Seanan McGuire, Novelist
“Howl’s Moving Castle made such an impression on me when I read it for the first time, because I realised: This is what fantasy can be! This was in the 1980s and 1990s, when all the fantasy covers were big buff men holding swords, or wizards with lasers shooting out of their hands, and then you have Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s absolutely tremendous.” Read more...
T.J. Klune, Novelist
“That was, for me, at seven or eight a very important book. Not just because I loved it, but because it was a sort of turning point for me in realising how wonderful books could be. It mixes magic and reality in such a brilliant way that the magic feels very real. I adored this book and read it to all my little siblings and cousins… That power of reading aloud to younger children, making them laugh and seeing them as excited as I was, I think it’s possibly part of why I’m doing what I’m doing now.” Read more...
Cressida Cowell, Children's Author
“Christopher doesn’t realise that other people’s dreams aren’t like his. He simply gets up each night and finds the corner he needs to turn to enter ‘the place between the worlds’, a rather formless and unfriendly valley…This is the beauty of Diana Wynne-Jones, I think. Her magic feels so real, because it’s never overblown. It’s just another fact in people’s lives.” Read more...
“There are two protagonists, who tell the story in alternating chapters: Nick Mallory in our own Britain, and Roddy in parallel-universe-Britain, where the same recognisable geography is referred to as the Isles of Blest. The Merlin is a political office in Roddy’s Britain, alongside the King. The old Merlin has died, apparently of natural causes, but Roddy suspects foul play; and so she embarks on a perilous quest to uncover the political conspiracy at work.” Read more...
Interviews where books by Diana Wynne Jones were recommended
The Best Teen Fantasy Books Set in Britain, recommended by Sylvia Bishop
Britain offers rich pickings to writers: wild and windswept locations, peculiar folklore, a treasure trove of odd histories and even odder place names. Taking Britain as a starting point, many fantasy authors have produced stories that are at once wonderfully strange and hauntingly plausible. Our fantasy interviewer Sylvia Bishop picks out her top five fantasy books set in Britain for teen readers.
The Best Portal Fantasy Books, recommended by Sylvia Bishop
In portal fantasy, characters leave one world for another – satisfying a yearning we all share, says fantasy novelist and Five Books fantasy editor Sylvia Bishop. She introduces us to five unforgettable doorways – through attics and out of dreams, via the liminal spaces between worlds, into the endless possibilities beyond.
The best books on Parallel Worlds, recommended by Joanna Kavenna
The concept of parallel worlds is no more dubious than that of a single reality, and it’s something that writers have known for centuries, says British novelist Joanna Kavenna. She recommends some of her favourite books that focus on parallel realities.
Magical Stories for Kids, recommended by Cressida Cowell
From wizards to alchemy and fairies to folklore, Cressida Cowell reveals the magical stories that were most important to her as a child (and which she now delights in sharing with her own children), and her own inspirations for writing about magic and magical worlds today.
Classic Children’s Books
From the lessons in logic embedded in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the lore that J.R.R. Tolkien tried to create in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there is more to many iconic books than a good story for kids. Here’s our roundup of some of the children’s classics that have been recommended on Five Books over the years.
The Best Cozy Fantasy Books, recommended by T.J. Klune
Low-stakes 'cozy' fantasy is very popular right now, says the bestselling author TJ Klune—and as a result it's a very exciting time to be working in the genre. Here he recommends five cozy fantasy novels, all with magical worlds to get lost inside: from moving castles to coffee shops at the end of the world.
The Best Love Stories, recommended by Jenny Davidson
From Jane Austen to James Baldwin, the best love stories in literature recommended by Jenny Davidson, novelist, historian and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
The Best Urban Fantasy Books, recommended by Seanan McGuire
We tell ourselves fantastical stories to account for all that cannot be explained, says Seanan McGuire, the multi-award winning author of the October Daye, InCryptid, and Indexing series. Here, she selects five of the best urban fantasy books—fabulous novels that help us find the magical in the mundane.
Comfort Reads, recommended by Neil Gaiman
In The Neil Gaiman Reader, fans from around the world chose which of Neil Gaiman’s writings they liked the best, a great introduction to his writing for anyone not familiar with his work. Here the prolific, genre-bending author recommends some of his own favourite books: comfort reads to turn to in difficult times.
