Waiting on Wednesday--Enchanted Glass, by Diana Wynne Jones

As Anne of Green Gables said, when she had become Anne of the House of Dreams, "Oh Gilbert, I can't wait for spring," or something like that (she was going to have a baby).

I, too, am looking forward to spring, for very different reasons. Not only is Megan Whalen Turner's new book coming out, but Diana Wynne Jones will also have a new one, and it sounds lovely.

Lifted from her agent's page:

When the magician Jocelyn Brandon Hope died he bequeathed Melstone House to his grandson Andrew. He also left his ‘field of care’: an area of strangeness surrounding the land around the house, whose boundary Andrew must walk in order to preserve its power.

Andrew had always loved the house, but he finds owning it a lot more complicated, aside from all the magic. There is Mrs Stock, the tyrannical housekeeper who won’t let him move the furniture and punishes him with her terrible cooking. Just as bad is the obsessive gardener who will only grow giant inedible vegetables. To add to his troubles, twelve year old orphan Aidan Cain suddenly arrives on the doorstep begging protection from magical stalkers, and Andrew’s sinister rich neighbour, Mr Brown, begins to encroach on the ‘field of care’. The one compensation is the gardener’s beautiful niece, Stashe. Things become stranger and stranger until all is made clear with the help of the enchanted glass itself.

Coming April of 2010 from Harper Collins/Greenwillow (as is the MWT book).