The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones

He rolled his head to stare down at the furry floor.

That told him he was in a fairly long room. He rolled his head around the other way and saw the panels of a wall quite near. In the far distance, he could blurrily see someone else, leaning up against a wall like a doll, but he felt too queer to be very interested in that. He seemed to be lying on his face on a hard but faintly furry floor. 'He rolled his head sideways on his arms. 'When Tonino came to his senses – at, incidentally, the precise moment when the enchanted book began to shrivel away – he had, at first, a nightmare feeling that he was shut in a cardboard box,' writes Wynne Jones. What were you trying to do?' 'Save Time City, of course,' Sam said juicily out of the middle of his butter-pie.')Īnd I think my claustrophobia may partly stem from the scene in The Magicians of Caprona – purchased with a birthday book token, so very much treasured – in which Tonino and Angelica are turned into puppets and trapped in a cardboard box by the evil duchess (although, as I've said before, Alan Garner must also shoulder some of the blame). It was so marvellous that she simply said quietly, 'You owe me an explanation. Wonderful tastes filled her mouth, everything buttery and creamy she had ever tasted, with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes she had never met before, all of it icy cold.

She would have objected if she had not at that moment bitten into the butter-pie. ('Vivian was getting very tired of being called V.S. And I decided that the butter-pies of A Tale of Time City (despite my previously mentioned aversion for time travel stories) beat the hot-cold goodies of The Faraway Tree for top fictional food. Power of Three was another favourite I'd stride about the moor by my cousins' home in Wales, glancing surreptitiously and hopefully around for the Dorig.

I was terrified of Monigan – an old rag doll which turns out to represent an ancient and hungry goddess – in The Time of the Ghost: still am, in fact. Pre-teen moment when romance becomes something desired, but never likely to actually happen ( Margaret Mahy's The Changeover is another book that reminds me of this difficult, possibility-packed time of my life, and I think I'm still slightly in love with Mahy's Sorry and Wynne Jones's Tom).

The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones