The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two: From the world of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - now a major BBC series (The book of dust, 2)

Product Information

As ever, Pullman's story is complex and vast but home to some of the finest storytelling in the 21st century. First, there’s Marcel Delamare, Lyra’s estranged uncle who blames her for the death of her mother, his sister, the diabolical Mrs. Initially is is hard to imagine the Lyra of the older books turning into this indecisive and unimaginative adult plagued by self doubt, but it happens - to pretty much every young celebrity for a start! Most recently, he has illustrated the cover of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust , and has lent his woodcut style to Dinosaurium . This all lends the story a sort of metanarrative layer, one where Pullman seems to argue with his younger self, who perhaps held different views to the ones he holds now.

And second, there’s Olivier Bonneville, the son of Gerard Bonneville from La Belle Sauvage, who blames Lyra for the death of his father — and who can read the alethiometer, the magical tool that always tells the truth, just as well as Lyra can. Pullman’s narrative method is to divide our attentions not only between Lyra, Malcolm and Pan, but also between them and the leading operatives of the Magisterium, scheming and debating about how to perpetuate their chilly faith. It is almost ten years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, bestselling His Dark Materials sequence.

His books include the much-loved George and the Dragon and also Scruffy Bear and the Six White Mice (winner of the Children's Book Award). Bonneville, using the nauseating new method of reading the alethiometer, realises that Lyra and Pan are separated.

Janet, a secretary at Jordan, witnesses the arrest and informs Brenda Polstead; together they travel to Hannah Relf’s house and successfully defend her from several agents. It opens with a contrarian epigraph from Blake: “Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of the truth. As ever, Pullman’s story is complex and vast but home to some of the finest storytelling in the 21st century.Her daemon goes on a long journey to Wittenberg (the city of Martin Luther, where Hamlet went to university) to accuse the stern intellectual, Gottfried Brande, of stealing Lyra’s imagination from her. As a child, she lied happily and with a clear conscience; she was good at it because it never occurred to her not to be, because she didn’t have the imagination to wonder if something might go wrong. In this world, humans' souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sapient " dæmons" in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans. Meeting her again after all these years is like running into a childhood friend at a school reunion and feeling a shock of estranged recognition hit you straight in the gut: Oh, you’re just the same as you always were.