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
Northern Lights
by Philip Pullman · 1995 · His Dark Materials, book 1
What is Northern Lights about?
Lyra Belacqua, half-wild ward of an alternate Oxford where everyone's soul walks beside them as a dæmon, eavesdrops from a wardrobe on her formidable uncle's heresies about Dust — and is swept into the hunt for the child-stealing Gobblers, whose work in the Arctic involves a silver guillotine and the Church's deepest anxieties about original sin. Her allies: gyptians, witches, a Texan balloonist and Iorek Byrnison, deposed king of the armoured bears, fantasy's best ursine character by an unbridgeable margin. The alethiometer tells her the truth; the adults, almost uniformly, do not. Published in the US, with a tin ear, as The Golden Compass.
Why it matters
Carnegie Medal winner, later voted the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' — the public's favourite winner in the medal's history — and the launch of the trilogy that made children's fantasy a battleground of ideas; filmed in 2007 and serialised by the BBC/HBO.
Where does it sit in the series?
Lyra, Will, the alethiometer, the subtle knife and the war on the Authority: Pullman's Miltonic trilogy that retold the Fall as liberation and raised children's fantasy's ceiling for good.
In the Guide from His Dark Materials:
- Northern Lights (1995)
- The Amber Spyglass (2000)
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