If you need an introduction before you start reading, here’s one: This is the story of the Dog Star, Sirius, who is punished for a crime by being incarnated as a real dog, here on Earth. It’s a detective story, and an adventure; it’s a fantasy, and sometimes it’s science fiction, and then it breaks all the rules by twining myth into the mix as well, and does it so well that you realize that really, there aren’t any rules. It’s an animal story for anyone who has ever had, or wanted, a pet—or a human story for any animal that has ever wanted a person. It’s funny, and it’s exciting and honest, and it has some sad bits too.

If you read it, you’ll like it.

Trust me. Come back when you’ve read the book.

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Welcome back.

Diana Wynne Jones wrote some of the best children’s books that have ever been written. She started writing them with Wilkins’ Tooth (a.k.a. Witch’s Business) in 1973, and she continued writing them until she died in March 2011. She wrote about people, and she wrote about magic, and she wrote both of them with perception and imagination, with humor and clearness of vision.

We met in 1985, at a British Fantasy Convention, and we met before the convention started because we had both got there early, so I introduced myself, and I told her that I loved her books, and we were friends that quickly and that easily, and we stayed friends for over a quarter of a century. She was a very easy person to stay friends with, smart and funny and wise and always sensible and honest.

At her best, Diana’s stories feel real. The people, with their follies and their dreams, feel as real as the magic does. In this book, she takes you inside the head of someone learning to be a dog, and it is real, because the people are real, and the cats are real, and the voice of the sunlight feels real as well.

Her books are not easy. They don’t give everything up on first reading. If I am reading a novel by Diana Wynne Jones to myself, I expect to have to go back and reread bits to figure everything out. She expects you to be bright: she has given you all the pieces, and it is up to you to put them together.

Dogsbody isn’t easy. (It’s not hard, either. But it’s not easy.) It begins in the middle, at the end of a trial. Sirius, the Dog Star, is being tried in a court of his peers. It’s five pages of science fiction, and just as we’re getting used to it we are thrust, like Sirius, into the mind, what there is of it, of a newborn puppy, and we are in a dog’s-eye-view look at the world.

The magic of Dogsbody is that it’s a book about being a dog. And it’s a book about being a star. It’s a love story, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote very few love stories, and normally in those she wrote, the love was flawed and imperfect. But the love of this dog for this girl, and of this girl for her dog, is a perfect and unconditional thing, and we know this is true as soon as we meet Kathleen. We learn about her life—the politics of the family she’s in, and the greater politics that put her there.