Age 8-11

This is the first novel for 20 years in Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series. Chrestomanci is a nine-lived enchanter who moves between many parallel worlds. In this story, he is a teenager in an eclectic world in which England never separated from Europe and where magical powers are everyday. A boy called Conrad lives in the bookshop of a small town with his preoccupied writer-mother and his uncle, a wizard, who sends him off to the ruling manor with a quest. Conrad befriends suave and dapper Christopher, the Chrestomanci-to-be, who, despite his aristocratic demeanour, works at the manor as a footman. One of the characteristics of these novels is that events seem to grow organically; this story, however, is more than usually structured (although it does contain a joyous sortie into assorted contrasting settings before it is wrapped up with some ingenuity). Enhanced by delightful drawings by Tim Stevens, the book also picks up characters from the earlier stories (among them the necromancer Gabriel de Witt) but, like one of Chrestomanci’s interconnected universes, you can live quite happily in this world without knowing the other ones.

(HarperCollins £12.99)

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