The Amber Spyglass
Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 — the first children's book ever to take the overall prize — and the most theologically audacious bestseller in the YA canon; the trilogy's capstone and lightning rod alike.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is Howl's Moving Castle about?
Sophie Hatter, eldest of three in a land where everyone knows the eldest fails first, is transformed by the Witch of the Waste into a ninety-year-old woman — and finds the change oddly liberating: no longer shy, she installs herself as cleaning lady in the walking castle of the wizard Howl, vain, cowardly, serially heartbroken-hearted and Welsh (the castle's fourth door opens onto a rugby-watching family in Wales). With the fire demon Calcifer angling for release from his contract, Sophie scolds, scrubs and accidentally enchants her way to the truth about Howl's missing heart, her own buried magic, and a curse built from a Donne poem.
Why it matters
Jones's best-known book worldwide thanks to Miyazaki's Oscar-nominated 2004 film — which she enjoyed while noting it was someone else's story — and a permanent fixture of comfort-fantasy canons.
Read next
Charmed Life
Guardian Award winner and the launch of Chrestomanci: the wittiest of the great British children's fantasy sequences and a visible ancestor of the boarding-school-magic boom that followed two decades later.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
The bestselling opening volume in publishing history and the recruitment event for a global reading generation: whatever else is said (and everything has been), the modern mass audience for fantasy walks through this book.