Description from book
This outstanding collection showcases the superb skills, the style, the offbeat quirkiness and sheer narrative power of this award-winning fantasist. 

A child born to an ordered world, pre-ordained to spread Dissolution... a precognitive dream which turns into a nightmare... a girl who so loves the sun that she will deny her humanity for all time... a cat and a boy, held captive by a magician until they find their own magic... a girl cursed with magical powers that may destroy her - or help save a world... a writer battling for supremacy over her computer keyboard... a woman imprisoned in a strange country... 

These seven tales show why Diana Wynne Jones is regarded as Britain's finest fantasy writer.

The book Seeing is Believing is a sort of alternative USA version of Minor Arcana with just one change, replacing The True State of Affairs with the story Enna Hittims.

The Minor Arcana stories:

• The Sage of Theare
• The Master
• The Girl Who Loved the Sun
• Dragon Reserve, Home Eight
• What the Cat Told Me
• nad and Dan and Quaffy
• The True State of Affairs

The Girl Who Loved the Sun

This is the story of a girl who so loves the sun that she decides the only thing that will please it and cause it to love her back is to become a tree.

What Diana Wynne Jones says
I had been thinking about all those Greek stories where women get turned into plants and animals, and I kept wondering how and why: how it felt to the person it happened to and why they let it happen.  It seemed to me that nothing that radical could happen to someone without their personal consent and I wondered why one might consent. (From Minor Arcana).

Also published in Heartache, edited by Miriam Hodgson, Methuen, 1990

What the Cat Told Me

A cat settles down on someone's lap and tells the story of how she lived with Old Man, who was cruel, and Boy, who was nice but belonged to Old Man.  How she and Boy escaped from Old Man and how she became a nomad, destined to wander for a thousand years, is told in between requests for strawberries and a piece of paper with a string.

What Diana Wynne Jones says
I asked myself for a story with "What the Cat Told Me".  When I wrote it, I was suffering cat-deprivation.  I was brought up with cats and didn't have one at that time.  I love the exacting self-centredness of cats.  The story is about that. (From Minor Arcana.) Also published in Fantasy Stories.

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