"There are thousands of worlds, all different from ours," says Diana Wynne Jones in the introduction to this collection of four short stories featuring her most famous creation. "Chrestomanci's world is the one next door to us, and the difference is that magic is as common as music is with us." And to the enormous relief of her legion of fans, the author has finally returned to that world again with a brand new story featuring her nine-lived enchanter Chrestomanci, the star of four previous full-length novels: Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona,Witch Week and The Lives of Christopher Chant. "The Stealer of Souls" combines the inhabitants of Chrestomanci Castle during Charmed Life and one of the young characters from The Magicians of Caprona to great effect, creating a tale with all the usual suspects—original fantasy, spooky humour, substantial characters and a dastardly plot to ruin Chrestomanci and take over the worlds. It's vintage Dianna Wynne Jones.

But there's more. Alongside the new story is another not published in the UK before, Carol Oneir's Hundreth Dream. In it, Chrestomanci is called upon to find out why a young dream-maker is unable to realise her landmark hundredth "Dream film". The magician must go deep inside her mind to unravel her true intentions. Two further collected stories from other anthologies—Warlock at the Wheel and The Sage of Theare—both feature characters new and old, making Mixed Magics a tantalising glimpse of the quality of fantasy that has gone before—and hopefully what is still to come. —John McLay

Master fantasist Diana Wynne Jones, author of the Chrestomanci books, scores another winner in The Merlin Conspiracy. This absorbing tale of magic and courtly intrigue is told in two voices. In the world called Islands of the Blest, Roddy is a young page who has grown up travelling with her family in the King's Progress, a constant journey around the kingdom. Just after she and her younger friend Grundo spot a growing conspiracy to overthrow the King and change the balance of magic, they are whisked away to visit Roddy's grim and silent grandfather; when they return the Progress has moved on without them. Meanwhile in another world, Nick Mallory, 14, blunders into a dreamlike adventure that leads him to the powerful wizard Romanov and involves him in Roddy's mission to save the worlds from the upset planned by the conspiracy.

The story moves through several precariously linked worlds in vividly imagined episodes told alternately by Roddy and Nick, as their journeys begin to mesh. Part of the fun for the reader is sorting out Roddy's many wizardly relatives from the double perspective and clicking them into place in the plot. Wynne Jones's many fans will pounce on this complex but fast-moving fantasy that features not only 34 characters, but a panther, a goat, a dragon, and an extremely charming elephant. (Ages 10-14) —Patty Campbell, Amazon.com

Apart from the occasional short story, Diana Wynne Jones' fans have been starved of her most famous creation, the dressing-gown wearing magician Christopher Chant—star of all her Chrestomanci novels—for nearly twenty years. It's been far too long! J.K. Rowling was knee-high to a grasshopper when the first book in this sequence, Charmed Life, hit the shelves in 1977 and, although this hugely talented fantasy author has gone on to create a myriad of other imagined and fantastically crazy worlds, it is her books featuring the world-hopping Chrestomanci that have remained her most appreciated and popular tomes.

In Conrad's Fate, his uncle tells twelve-year-old Conrad Tesdinic that his constant and terrible luck is the result of a shocking dose of bad karma that within the year could threaten his very existence. He is despatched at once to Stallery Mansion, high in the mountainous Alps above his hometown of Stallchester, to work in disguise as a servant. There, in the magical fortress that seems to dominate the whole town, he must infiltrate its workings and seek out the person who has interfered so disastrously with his fate.

Along the way, Conrad strikes up a friendship with a mysterious, self-assured older boy, who has a mission of his own—to find his friend Millie who has hidden herself thereabouts. The discovery that Stallery Mansion lays on a `probability fault' adds gloriously to the wonderment and adventure that inevitably follows.

In some ways a prequel to the earlier novels, in that this book features Chant as a teenager before his Chrestomanci guise, there is definitely no need, however, to read it first. Any of other titles such as Witch Week or The Lives of Christopher Chant will be equally superb introductions to this infamous creation and just as entertaining. (Age 10 and over) —John McLay

Bold As Love is technically a science fiction novel, set as it is in a near future of political collapse and technological development, and yet it sprawls over the border between SF and fantasy. Ax is a rock musician conscripted by the government of post-Union England to consider the future and co-opt the counter-culture. He stays on to run things when the disgusting character, Pigsty, massacres his way to power, and Ax gradually becomes the much-loved centre of power and policy. Part of what keeps him ahead of events is a brain implant with all the information a benevolent despot might need; part is his fey lover Fiorinda and his best friend Sage, who is in love with Fiorinda and not sure of his exact feelings for Ax. These three are almost a latter-day Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot... a fact that does not bode well for the second volume.

Jones' picture of a world falling apart at the seams—with its worryingly coherent portrayal of a competent dictator—is one of the more impressive things she has done; and Fiorinda with her conscience and angst-ridden past is a passionately lovable heroine. —Roz Kaveney