I came late to Diana Wynne Jones. I managed to miss her first time around, my childhood reading filled instead with Asterix and the Hardy Boys, but now I burn with the zeal of the newly converted, after finding her charming and exasperating Wizard Howl a bona fide star of bedtime reading.

We first hear of our eponymous wizard in the opening chapter, where Jones is busy poking fun at the comfortable cliches of fantasy fiction. After suffering the misfortune of being born the eldest of three sisters in a land where seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, Sophie Hatter is resigning herself to the uninteresting life that must surely follow, when a castle appears on the hills above the prosperous town of Market Chipping and refuses to stay still.

Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could actually see it moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty grey gusts.

Soon the townspeople are saying that the castle belongs to Wizard Howl, who amuses himself by “collecting young girls and sucking the souls from them. Or some people said he ate their hearts.” Before the first chapter is finished Sophie’s father is dead, her sisters sent off to apprenticeships various and Sophie is withdrawing into a small alcove at the back of her stepmother’s hat shop. By the end of the second, she is looking up at the forbidding black battlements in hope of shelter, after an awkward customer has transformed her into an old crone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I’m dying of boredom,’ Howl said pathetically. ‘Or maybe just dying’ ... a still from the Studio Ghibli film adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle. Photograph: BuenaVist/Everett/Rex Features

The spell is typically uncanny, arriving without warning in a flinging motion of a spread hand, transforming Sophie in an instant before she or the reader has any idea what has happened. Jones measures out the awful realisation over a page or so – the strange croak in Sophie’s voice, the look of horror from the man standing by the shop door, the large veins on the back of Sophie’s suddenly wrinkled hands. Hobbling over to the mirror, Sophie is unsurprised to discover a gaunt old woman, “withered and brownish, surrounded by wispy white hair”, with her own eyes staring out at her, “looking rather tragic”.

Sophie’s reaction is equally unexpected, and just as straightforwardly convincing. Judging that her leathery cheeks are a better reflection of her true nature than her former youthful appearance, she decides she must just make do. There’s no question of staying in the shop – her stepmother would have a fit – and she can’t face saying goodbye to a sister who wouldn’t recognise her, so she wraps herself in a shawl, collects her purse and shuffles off on an adventure she feels she hardly deserves.

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It’s this combination of the fantastical and the fantastically human that makes Howl’s Moving Castle such excellent bedtime fare. How does the castle manage to be in four places at once? Do the packets and jars on the bathroom shelves labelled SKIN, EYES and HAIR really contain pieces of unfortunate girls? Can Sophie trust the fire demon crackling in the grate? And why is Howl so infuriatingly difficult to pin down?

With further instalments to follow in the desert city of Zanzib and the mountainous kingdom of High Norland, there’s plenty of territory to explore until it’s time for lights out. For anyone who, like me, is arriving late to Jones’s magical worlds, the only question is whether bedtime should head next for Dalemark or for the multiple worlds of Chrestomanci.