His Dark Materials

by Philip Pullman

The trilogy that establishes Lyra's world and the wider multiverse, following Lyra Belacqua from her childhood in the cloistered world of Jordan College, Oxford through a journey that takes her across multiple worlds and places her at the centre of a war that will determine the nature of consciousness itself. Beginning with Northern Lights, which introduces the world's distinctive theology, daemons, and the mystery of Dust, the trilogy moves through increasing philosophical and emotional complexity to a conclusion that engages directly with Milton's Paradise Lost and the question of whether innocence or experience is the greater human gift.

Part of His Dark Materials

A multiverse of parallel worlds connected by invisible threads of Dust - elementary particles that accumulate around conscious beings and that different cultures variously interpret as sin, dark matter, or the physical substrate of the soul. The universe is most fully realised through the world of Lyra Belacqua, an alternative Earth where the Catholic Church never lost its grip on European civilisation and every human is accompanied by a daemon - an animal-shaped external manifestation of their soul that can speak, feel, and change form until the onset of adulthood fixes its shape permanently. Pullman's universe is distinguished by the seriousness with which it treats its central questions - consciousness, free will, the nature of growing up, and the institutional tendency to confuse authority with truth. Built across six novels spanning several decades of Lyra's life, it is one of the richest and most philosophically engaged secondary world constructions in contemporary fiction.

Publication Order

1
Northern Lights
1995
2
The Subtle Knife
1997
3
The Amber Spyglass
2000