Author

Diana Wynne Jones

Q: What should I read first by Diana Wynne Jones?

Start with the The Dalemark Quartet series and read it in publication order.

Diana Wynne Jones has written 42 books across 3 series. Start with The Dalemark Quartet.

Diana Wynne Jones was a British author who spent over four decades writing some of the most inventive fantasy fiction published for young readers, prized as much by adults as by children for prose that was witty, structurally daring, and never condescending. She's best known for Howl's Moving Castle (1986), about a young woman transformed into an old crone by a witch's curse who moves into a wizard's magical walking castle and finds a way to break her own spell -- adapted into the Studio Ghibli film by Hayao Miyazaki, which introduced her to a huge new international audience. Her longest-running work is the seven-book Chrestomanci series, set across a multiverse of parallel worlds overseen by an enchanter with nine lives, and she also wrote the four-book Dalemark Quartet and dozens of acclaimed standalone novels including Fire and Hemlock, Dogsbody and Archer's Goon. Jones's plots are known for withholding information as a structural device -- worlds, family relationships and magic systems that only make full sense once the book's final chapters recontextualize everything that came before -- and for heroines and heroes who are stubborn, difficult and never simply likeable, a deliberate rejection of the well-behaved child-protagonist template. She taught and mentored other fantasy writers, and her influence is widely cited by later authors including Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling. New readers most often start with Howl's Moving Castle or Charmed Life, the first Chrestomanci novel published. Jones died in 2011; her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed from her notes by her sister Ursula Jones and published posthumously in 2014.

Series: 3
Books: 42
First published: 1973
Best known for: The Dalemark Quartet

Series by Diana Wynne Jones

4books

The Dalemark Quartet

Diana Wynne Jones

fantasy

7books

Chrestomanci

Diana Wynne Jones

fantasy

3books

Howl's Moving Castle

Diana Wynne Jones

fantasy

Standalone books

Read these in any order — each is a complete story.

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Wilkins' Tooth
Novel1973
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The Ogre Downstairs
Novel1974
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Dogsbody
Novel1975
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Eight Days of Luke
Novel1975
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Power of Three
Novel1976
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The Homeward Bounders
Novel1981
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The Time of the Ghost
Novel1981
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Archer's Goon
Novel1984
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Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories
Novel1984
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Fire and Hemlock
Novel1985
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A Tale of Time City
Novel1987
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Chair Person
Novel1989
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Wild Robert
Novel1989
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Black Maria
Novel1991
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A Sudden Wild Magic
Novel1992
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Hexwood
Novel1993
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Stopping for a Spell
Novel1993
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The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
Novel1996
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Deep Secret
Novel1997
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Dark Lord of Derkholm
Novel1998
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Believing Is Seeing
Novel1999
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Year of the Griffin
Novel2000
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The Merlin Conspiracy
Novel2003
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Unexpected Magic
Novel2004
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The Game
Novel2007
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Enchanted Glass
Novel2010
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Earwig and the Witch
Novel2011
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The Islands of Chaldea
Novel2014
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