Part of the contract, however, stipulates that neither Howl nor Calcifer can disclose the main clause, leaving Sophie to figure it out on her own. She strikes a bargain with Howl's fire demon, Calcifer: if she can break the contract between Howl and Calcifer, then Calcifer will return her to her original youthful form.

When the powerful Witch of the Waste considers her a threat and turns her into an old crone, Sophie leaves the shop and finds work as a cleaning lady for the notorious wizard Howl. Unbeknownst to her, she is able to talk life into objects. As the eldest, Sophie is resigned to a dull future running the family hat shop. Plot summary ġ8-year-old Sophie Hatter is the eldest of three sisters living in Market Chipping, a town in the magical kingdom of Ingary, where fairytale tropes are accepted ways of life, including that the eldest of three will never be successful. He had 'asked me to write a book titled The Moving Castle'. įor the idea Jones 'very much' thanked 'a boy in a school I was visiting', whose name she had noted but lost and forgot. WorldCat reports that Howl's Moving Castle is the author's work most widely held in participating libraries, followed by its first sequel Castle in the Air. This series also includes Castle in the Air, published in 1990, and House of Many Ways, published in 2008. Howl's Moving Castle is the first novel in the series of books called the Howl Series. It was adapted into a critically acclaimed 2004 animated film of the same name, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It was a runner-up for the annual Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and won the Phoenix Award twenty years later.

Howl's Moving Castle is a fantasy novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones, first published in 1986 by Greenwillow Books of New York.

Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones