The Amber Spyglass
Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 — the first children's book ever to take the overall prize — and the most theologically audacious bestseller in the YA canon; the trilogy's capstone and lightning rod alike.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is Fire and Hemlock about?
Polly, packing for university, notices she has two sets of memories: the dull official one, and another — fading like a photograph — in which, aged ten, she gatecrashed a funeral and befriended the cellist Thomas Lynn, inventing heroic stories with him by post that kept coming true in increasingly sinister ways. The buried strand is a Tam Lin retelling: Tom is the Queen-figure Laurel's sacrificial property, Polly the only one who might pull him back, and the price of remembering is the book's labyrinthine, argued-over ending. Jones's most personal and most literary novel, with a reading list folded in (Polly's education in heroism is the reader's).
Why it matters
A cult masterpiece of mythic YA — the standard against which Tam Lin retellings are measured — and the Jones novel writers (Gaiman included) most often name when asked what the form can do.
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