Charmed Life

Its place in Chrestomanci

Charmed Life is book 1 in the Chrestomanci series. It is followed by The Magicians of Caprona. See the full Chrestomanci reading order.

Chrestomanci is Diana Wynne Jones's longest-running series, built around a deceptively simple idea: in a multiverse of parallel worlds where magic works, someone with nine lives has to be appointed as a kind of government enchanter, keeping ordinary witches and wizards from causing catastrophes across worlds that don't all know magic is real. That role belongs to the elegant, maddeningly evasive Christopher Chant, who appears in every book but is rarely the narrator -- instead, each novel follows a different…