His Dark Materials

His Dark Materials
First combined edition (publ. Ted Smart, 2000)


AuthorPhilip Pullman
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreFantasy novel
PublisherScholastic
Published1995–2000
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Followed byThe Book of Dust

His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights (1995; published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. In 2003, the trilogy was ranked third on the BBC's The Big Read poll.[1]

Although His Dark Materials has been marketed as young adult fiction, and the central characters are children, Pullman wrote with no target audience in mind. The fantasy elements include witches and armoured polar bears; the trilogy also alludes to concepts from physics, philosophy, and theology. It functions in part as a retelling and inversion of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost,[2] with Pullman commending humanity for what Milton saw as its most tragic failing, original sin.[3] The trilogy has attracted controversy for its criticism of religion.

The London Royal National Theatre staged a two-part adaptation of the trilogy in 2003–2004. New Line Cinema released a film adaptation of Northern Lights, The Golden Compass, in 2007. A HBO/BBC television series based on the novels was broadcast between November 2019 and February 2023.[4][5]

Pullman followed the trilogy with three novellas set in the Northern Lights universe: Lyra's Oxford (2003), Once Upon a Time in the North (2008), and Serpentine (2020). La Belle Sauvage, the first book in a new trilogy titled The Book of Dust, was published on 19 October 2017; the second book of the new trilogy, The Secret Commonwealth, was published in October 2019. Both are set in the same universe as Northern Lights.

  1. ^ "BBC – The Big Read". BBC. April 2003. Retrieved 26 July 2019
  2. ^ Robert Butler (3 December 2007). "An Interview with Philip Pullman". The Economist. Intelligent Life. Archived from the original on 5 March 2008. Retrieved 10 July 2008.
  3. ^ Freitas, Donna; King, Jason Edward (2007). Killing the imposter God: Philip Pullman's spiritual imagination in His Dark Materials. San Francisco, CA: Wiley. pp. 68–9. ISBN 978-0-7879-8237-9.
  4. ^ "His Dark Materials". BBC One. Retrieved 28 October 2019.
  5. ^ "His Dark Materials". HBO. Archived from the original on 10 August 2020. Retrieved 28 October 2019.