His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (Book 1) - Paperback

by Philip Pullman (Author)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "MARVELOUS."--The New Yorker - An Entertainment Weekly All-Time Greatest Novel - A Newsweek Top 100 Book of All Time - Winner of the Carnegie Medal - The Inspiration for the HBO Original Series His Dark Materials

DON'T MISS THE EPIC FINALE TO LYRA'S STORY: THE ROSE FIELD, AVAILABLE NOW!

Discover the modern fantasy classic that kicked off the epic trilogies His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust--a world where humans have animal familiars and parallel universes are within reach.

"Pullman is quite possibly a genius."--Newsweek

A war is brewing in Lyra's world between those who would keep people in ignorance and those willing to fight for freedom. Lyra is thrust into the middle of the conflict when her uncle Asriel comes to Oxford, fomenting rebellion, and when her best friend, Roger, suddenly disappears.

Lyra learns that Roger was kidnapped by a shadowy organization that is rumored to experiment on children. To find him, she will travel to the cold, far North, where armored bears and witch clans rule--and where Asriel is attempting to build a bridge to a parallel world.

What Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other--and that her actions will have consequences not just in her world, but in all the worlds beyond.

Look for the modern fantasy classics of HIS DARK MATERIALS:
The Golden Compass - The Subtle Knife - The Amber Spyglass

And Lyra's adventures continue in THE BOOK OF DUST:
La Belle Sauvage - The Secret Commonwealth - The Rose Field

Front Jacket

In a landmark epic of fantasy and storytelling, Philip Pullman invites readers into a world as convincing and thoroughly realized as Narnia, Earthsea, or Redwall. Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors. First, her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North, including photographs of a mysterious celestial phenomenon called Dust and the dim outline of a city suspended in the Aurora Borealis that he suspects is part of an alternate universe. He leaves Lyra in the care of Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her. In this multilayered narrative, however, "nothing is as it seems. Lyra sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger, bearing a rare truth-telling instrument, the compass of the title. All around her children are disappearing--victims of so-called "Gobblers"--and being used as subjects in terrible experiments that separate humans from their daemons, creatures that reflect each person's inner being. And somehow, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved.

Author Biography

Philip Pullman is one of the most acclaimed writers working today. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. He is also the author of another trilogy set in the same world, The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage, The Secret Commonwealth, and The Rose Field) as well as numerous other much-loved novels, a collection of fairy tales, and a volume of essays and speeches on writing. He has won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread (now Costa) Award, Parents' Choice Gold Awards, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Pullman was knighted for services to literature in the New Years Honours 2019. He lives in Oxford, England.