Chrestomanci

About the Chrestomanci series

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 young protagonist pulled into his orbit, usually a child who doesn't yet know how much magical power they have or how badly they're about to misuse it.

Charmed Life introduces the series through Cat Chant, a boy who doesn't realize his sister has been quietly stealing his magic for years. The Magicians of Caprona follows two feuding Italian spell-casting families forced to cooperate against a real threat. Witch Week is set in a boarding school in a world where witchcraft is illegal and punishable by burning. The Lives of Christopher Chant goes back to tell Christopher's own boyhood, before he became Chrestomanci. Conrad's Fate and The Pinhoe Egg, the two latest entries, follow a boy trying to fix his own fate through world-walking and a girl protecting an illegal magical family secret.

What holds the series together isn't a single continuing plot but a consistent, richly imagined magical bureaucracy and Jones's recurring interest in children who are more powerful, more responsible, or more compromised than the adults around them realize. It's frequently cited as the best entry point into her work for readers who love portal fantasy and multiverse worldbuilding.

How to read this series

There are two defensible reading orders here, and reasonable readers disagree. Publication order starts with Charmed Life (1977) and lets you experience the series the way Jones wrote it, discovering who Chrestomanci is gradually rather than meeting him already fully formed. Internal chronological order starts with The Lives of Christopher Chant, which tells Chrestomanci's own origin story first -- some later editions are numbered this way. Publication order is the more commonly recommended default and avoids Christopher Chant's backstory front-loading reveals that land better once you already know him as an adult; chronological order suits readers who prefer a straight in-world timeline. Mixed Magics, a short-story collection spanning various points in the timeline, works well read last either way.