Diana Wynne Jones

Jones wrote for children and declined to make it easy on them. Her books are usually shelved as fantasy, and they are, but they routinely import science fiction machinery, time travel, parallel worlds, alternate versions of the same person, and they are built like puzzles that only resolve on the last page or sometimes on the second reading. A Jones novel typically withholds the rules of its own world until the protagonist works them out, which is both the pleasure and the reason some readers bounce off her.

The major bodies of work are the Chrestomanci books, seven of them, about a world-hopping enchanter and the children who keep needing him; the Dalemark Quartet, her most straightforwardly epic sequence; and the Moving Castle trilogy that began with Howl's Moving Castle in 1986. Around those sit standalones that are frequently better than the series work, plus Dark Lord of Derkholm, which turns the machinery of commercial fantasy into its plot. She also wrote The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a mock reference book about genre cliche that a lot of working fantasy writers keep within reach.

What sets her apart is the domestic register. The magic in her books arrives inside families, and the villains are very often relatives. She was an academic and a literary critic as well as a novelist, and it shows in how deliberately she dismantles structures she plainly understands.