Howl's Moving Castle

Diana Wynne Jones, a British author, published the fantasy novel Howl's Moving Castle through Greenwillow Books in 1986. Twenty years after finishing as runner-up for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, it took the Phoenix Award, and in 2004 it became a Studio Ghibli animated film, which went on to an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.

Sophie Hatter, eighteen, is the oldest of three sisters in a family that lives in Market Chipping, a town in Ingary, a magical kingdom where fairy-tale rules count as facts of life, including the one that says the eldest of three will come to nothing. She expects to spend her life running the family hat shop, which she finds dull, and she does not know that she can talk life into objects.

The Witch of the Waste curses her into an old woman, and Sophie talks her way into the moving castle of the wizard Howl, who has a reputation for eating hearts and whose household is run by a fire demon bound by a contract nobody will explain. She takes over the cleaning, which turns out to be a form of magic, and starts working out what the fire demon, the apprentice and the wizard are each hiding. The book is as much about a household's domestic arrangements as it is about the curse.

Jones wrote two sequels, Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways, and the first book establishes Ingary, Howl, Sophie and the fire demon who powers the castle. It is a standalone story that has also been read as the first of three books about the same household.