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Cover of Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

Northern Lights

Philip Pullman

Book 1 of His Dark Materials

  • 410 pages · about 7 hours
  • First published 1995
  • 148 editions
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1 About this book

Lyra Belacqua is twelve and runs half wild among the scholars of Jordan College, Oxford, in a world like ours and unlike it, where every human being has a dæmon, an animal companion that is part of the self, and a powerful Church governs what may be thought. Her uncle, Lord Asriel, arrives with news from the Arctic of a mysterious substance called Dust. Soon afterward her friend Roger goes missing. Given a rare truth-telling instrument, the alethiometer, and taken up by the glamorous Mrs Coulter, Lyra is before long heading north herself. Published in 1995, and titled The Golden Compass in North America, this is the first book of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.

  • Adventure
  • Fantasy
  • Magic
  • Quests (Expeditions)
  • Science fiction
  • Survival
  • Kidnapping
  • Experiments

2 What to expect

The first book of His Dark Materials: a fierce, quick-witted twelve-year-old travels from an alternate Oxford to the Arctic to find a missing friend. It is an adventure with witches, armored bears and animal companions that are part of each person's soul, and beneath it runs a serious argument about authority, religion and growing up. It is written for young people without softening anything, cruelty to children included, and it leaves the story open for the next book.

Good for readers who want: intelligent fantasy adventure, a bold young heroine, and the start of a great trilogy.

3 About Philip Pullman

Born 1946

Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman (born 19 October 1946) is an English writer. He is best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. The first volume, Northern Lights (1995), won the Carnegie Medal and later the "Carnegie of Carnegies". The third volume, The Amber Spyglass (2000), won the Whitbread Award. In 2017, he started a companion trilogy, The Book of Dust, of which the final novel, The Rose Field, was published in October 2025.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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