Books by Diana Wynne Jones

“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...

Comfort Reads

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...

The Best Urban Fantasy Books

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...

The Best Cozy Fantasy Books

T.J. Klune, Novelist

“Rhat 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. It is about two sets of children, each from divorced families. The father from one and the mother from another have got together and this new blended family is struggling to get along. The children are given these magic chemistry sets and each different chemical does a different thing. One of the chemicals makes you fly, another one brings all your toys to life and another can turn you into someone else. One of them brings things to life, so they put this chemical on the toffee bars and the toffee bars come to life. They cast their wrappers as they get bigger, so their wrappers fall off and they start having baby toffee bars. All of this lovely attention to detail made it feel incredibly real. I adored this book and read it to all my little siblings and cousins. So I not only enjoyed it myself but I passed it on to them. 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...

Magical Stories for Kids

Cressida Cowell, Children's Author

“There is so much children’s fiction that is described as parallel worlds fiction – from Narnia to Alice in Wonderland to Marianne Dreams and so on. Diana Wynne Jones is a brilliant writer of this sort of book: it’s about a schoolboy who discovers that in his dreams he travels to many worlds. He’s quite innocent about it all and sees it as a child would – as an amazing experience that he doesn’t particularly try to analyse. His uncle asks him to do some experiments and sends him into these worlds with a spirit traveller called Tacroy, and tries to get him to bring stuff back.” Read more...

The best books on Parallel Worlds

Joanna Kavenna, Novelist

“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...

The Best Teen Fantasy Books Set in Britain

Sylvia Bishop, Children's Author