His Dark Materials: Gift Edition including all three novels: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass (Everyman's Library CLASSICS)

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The three novels have won a number of awards, most notably the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year prize, won by The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995. The trilogy took third place in the BBC's Big Read poll in 2003. The fantasy elements include witches and armoured polar bears, but the trilogy also alludes to ideas from physics, philosophy and theology. His Dark Materials is a series of books written by Philip Pullman. This is actually a trilogy, but it has five companion books that take place in the same universe. This book series won numerous awards, including the Carnegie medal in 1995, and the Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass in 2001. These fantasy books are classified as young adult fiction because their main characters are mostly children, but Pullman wrote them with no target audience in mind. Pullman’s shaped many young minds with this book series, and it is no surprise that it was ranked by readers third on the BBC’s The Big Read poll in 2003 of the nation’s best-loved novel of all time. The second book, The Secret Commonwealth, was published on 3 October 2019 and is set after the events in the original trilogy with Lyra as a twenty-year-old undergraduate. [2] Work on the third book in the series had not commenced at that time. Well, not quite. As early as Chapter 15 of Northern Lights, I’d said of Lyra that “Being a practised liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.” Imagination, as Pantalaimon understands, is not just a superficial facility for making things up. It’s much deeper, much more complex and mysterious than that, and it involves the whole of our being. A good deal of my own thinking about the imagination has been illuminated by William Blake, of course, and also by Iain McGilchrist’s inexhaustible book The Master and His Emissary, which explores the profound difference between the left and right halves of the brain. To some extent, my story was protected from awkward change because I set it in a world that was not ours. It was like ours, but different, so I could take account of the real-world changes that helped my story, and ignore those that didn’t. I didn’t want to write a pure fantasy of the Tolkien sort, unconnected at any point with the real world, because the real world was exactly what fiction ought to be dealing with; but I’d always felt ignorant about the real world, whatever and wherever that was. I could probably have written a realistic novel about teaching in the sort of school I was teaching in at the time, but I didn’t want to, probably because I wouldn’t have wanted to read one; and because of a combination of timidity and idleness, I knew practically nothing about anything else.

This special collection features all three titles in the award-winning trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. On a perilous journey from world to world, Lyra and Will uncover a deadly secret: an object of extraordinary and devastating power. And with every step, they move closer to an even greater threat – and the shattering truth of their own destiny. His Dark Materials is an epic trilogy of fantasy novels consisting of Northern Lights (1995, published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. In the first sentence above, I mentioned something I called the theme. By that I mean what the book is about, in some fundamental sense. I've heard that some writers decide on a theme first, and then make up some characters and a plot to exemplify it. They seem to get on all right, but again, it wouldn't work for me. A book, especially a long book like His Dark Materials, has to have some sort of theme, or else you'll be working for a long time (this story took me seven years) in a moral vacuum. But that doesn't mean you have to decide what the theme is. If you're working as seriously as you know how to, for a matter of years, then a theme will emerge whether you want it to or not. It'll be something you think very important. It might be the most important thing you know. Once you know what it is, you can shape the story more precisely to help it show up, but it's a mistake to rely on the theme to lead the story for you. I think I did that in a couple of places in this book, and it's the worse for it. But there we are, we're never too old to learn. Next time I shall remember: the story should lead, and the theme will emerge in its own time and its own way. Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.Pullman is quite possibly a genius… Using the lineaments of fantasy to tell the truth about the universal experience of growing up.”— Newsweek Dafne Keen as Lyra, with Pantalaimon, in the BBC’s His Dark Materials. Photograph: Screen Grab/BBC/Bad Wolf/HBO

These thrilling adventures tell the story of Lyra and Will—two ordinary children on a perilous journey through shimmering haunted otherworlds. They will meet witches and armored bears, fallen angels and soul-eating specters. And in the end, the fate of both the living—and the dead—will rely on them. In addition to the trilogy there are also two short novels: Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North. Lyra's Oxford is a sequel to The Amber Spyglass, and tells the story of a witch who seeks revenge for her son's death in the war against the Authority. She draws Lyra into a trap, but birds mysteriously rescue her and Pan and she makes the acquaintance of an alchemist who was formerly the witch's lover. Once Upon a Time in the North isa prequel to His Dark Materials and focuses on the 24-year-old Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby. After winning his hot-air balloon, Scoresby heads to the North, landing on the Arctic island Novy Odense, where he finds himself pulled into a dangerous conflict between the oil-tycoon Larsen Manganese, the corrupt mayoral candidate Ivan Poliakov, and his longtime enemy from the Dakota Country, Pierre McConville. The story tells of Lee and Iorek's first meeting and of how they overcame these enemies. The consul represented the interests of all the witch-clans, even those who were feuding. Lyra wasn’t sure if he’d remember their first meeting, and Pan scoffed. Oxford's Cherwell Interviews: Philip Pullman". Cherwell. 2 September 2009. Archived from the original on 13 June 2009 . Retrieved 2 June 2009. Mitchison, Amanda (3 November 2003). "The art of darkness". London: The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 19 November 2003 . Retrieved 12 January 2008.During a launch event for The Secret Commonwealth in October 2019, Pullman said, "We can see where the story is going in this book. It's going towards Central Asia, it involves roses and it involves Dust. That's all I can tell you⁠—I don't even have a title for it yet!" [16] [18] though he had earlier mentioned possible titles such as The Garden of Roses or Roses from the South. [19] A short excerpt of the first chapter is available as part of an interview on the blog of Goldsmiths, University of London. [20] This feeling came to a head during a visit she paid to the northern lands (a year after the witch Yelena Pazhets had nearly killed her in Oxford: the time when Lyra had been saved by the birds). The curse of Bolvangar had been lifted, but the northern lands had still not recovered from the climatic devastation Lord Asriel had caused. However, the retreat of the snows and the loosening of the permafrost meant that all kinds of archaeological work was possible, and Jordan College sponsored a dig in the region of Trollesund to investigate some recently discovered settlements of the Proto-Fisher people.

Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra with Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter in The Golden Compass (2007). Photograph: Laurie Sparham/New Line Cinema Phillip Pullman’s spellbinding His Dark Materials trilogy has captivated readers for over twenty years and won acclaim at every turn. It will have you questioning everything you know about your world and wondering what really lies just out of reach. a b c d e Flood, Alison (18 October 2017). "Philip Pullman launches La Belle Sauvage and says sequel is finished". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 19 October 2017.

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Anyway, the final part, The Amber Spyglass, was published in 2000, and I went on to write other things. But Lyra hadn’t finished the journey towards experience: she’d only begun it. There were many things she had yet to learn, and I was curious to see how this would happen. Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest war that has ever been – and a journey to a dark place from which no one has ever returned . . . Read more Details Fleming, Tom (3 August 2007). "A very grown-up children's author". London: The Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog . Retrieved 14 October 2015.

Author Philip Pullman Announces A Follow-Up Trilogy To 'His Dark Materials' ". NPR.org . Retrieved 15 February 2017.PHILIP PULLMAN is one of the most acclaimed writers working today. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy, which has been named one of the top 100 books of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. Pullman was knighted for his services to literature in the 2019 New Year Honours. When we first came I’d have been sure no one could forget us,” she agreed. “But now … I’m not so sure about things.”