Howl's Moving Castle

About the Howl's Moving Castle series

Howl's Moving Castle opens with a curse: Sophie Hatter, resigned to a dull life running her late father's hat shop because she's the eldest of three sisters in a world where eldest siblings never have adventures, is turned into a ninety-year-old woman by the vain, powerful Witch of the Waste. Rather than despair, Sophie marches into the four-legged, smoke-belching, magically animated castle belonging to the vain, cowardly wizard Howl and installs herself as his cleaning lady, striking up a prickly bargain with his fire demon, Calcifer, who will break her curse if she can work out the terms of the contract binding him to Howl. It's one of modern fantasy's most purely enjoyable premises, and Jones plays it for both comedy and genuine tenderness as Sophie's gruff new confidence and Howl's preening self-absorption edge, very reluctantly, toward love.

The two sequels widen the world rather than continuing Sophie's story directly. Castle in the Air follows Abdullah, a carpet merchant from the sultanate of Zanzib swept into a genie's plot involving stolen princesses, with Sophie, Howl and Calcifer arriving only in the second half. House of Many Ways centers on Charmain Baker, a bookish girl left to housesit for a wizard great-uncle whose home is riddled with magical space-bending trickery, with Sophie and Howl again appearing as supporting characters rather than leads. All three are tied together by setting and by Howl's household rather than by a continuing plot, and the trilogy became internationally famous well beyond Jones's usual readership after Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki adapted the first book into an acclaimed 2004 animated film.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Howl's Moving Castle (1986). The first book is a complete, self-contained story; Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways are set in the same world and bring Sophie, Howl and Calcifer back as supporting characters, but each follows its own new protagonist and new plot, so they read more like a linked trio than a continuing saga. If you've only seen the Studio Ghibli film, know that it adapts roughly the first half of the first book fairly closely and then goes its own way -- the novel's ending, and the two books that follow it, are entirely unfamiliar territory even to fans of the movie.