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 · Science Fiction
What is Star Man's Son about?
Two centuries after the atomic war, Fors of the Puma Clan — silver-haired, mutant, and therefore barred from the Star Hall explorers he was born to join — steals his dead father's gear and rides out into the contaminated lowlands with his telepathic hunting cat to map the ruined cities. What he finds includes rad-haunted ruins, the rat-like Beast Things, and a Black plainsman named Arskane whose friendship points towards a federation of the scattered tribes. Also published as Daybreak — 2250 A.D., it sold in the millions as a Marines-jacketed paperback.
Why it matters
The novel that recruited a generation into SF (ask any writer who was twelve in the 1950s-70s) and set the template for YA post-apocalypse decades before the boom.
Read next
Cat's Cradle
Hugo-shortlisted and permanently canonical: the Cold War's sharpest fable of careless science, and the source of 'karass', 'granfalloon' and ice-nine as cultural shorthand.
Charmed Life
Guardian Award winner and the launch of Chrestomanci: the wittiest of the great British children's fantasy sequences and a visible ancestor of the boarding-school-magic boom that followed two decades later.