Exclusive to the paperback edition, Chris Wormell's new original illustrations bring Lyra's world vividly to life. On a more banal level, it's also a book about growing up, and perhaps what we lose, or choose to lose in this and what the consequences of this might be. In my opinion, an excellent read, that takes the books depicting this world into a grittier, more realistic and more grown up direction very successfully, while retaining some of the whimsical fantasy and sheer imagination we have seen before.

We keep going back to the Maison Juste in Geneva, the world centre for “the examination of heresy and heretics”. And the deepest pleasure of reading The Secret Commonwealth comes from watching Lyra become more and more like the best parts of her child self, remembering how to lie fluently and commit herself to a quest with ferocious tenacity. The Secret Commonwealth is truly a book for our times; a powerful adventure and a thought-provoking look at what it is to understand yourself and to grow up and make sense of the world around you.But while I occasionally found myself wincing as I read The Secret Commonwealth, the book always kept pulling me inexorably forward. Pullman is such a gifted story teller that what it lacked in novelty was more than made up for in the telling of the tale.

Lyra is pitted against not only the agents of theocracy but also a ruthless multinational chemical company. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek. The big difference lies in the amount of time Pullman gives over to some very weighty metaphysical and phenomenological discussions - in an odd way, the book at times reminded me of the meaty novels-of-ideas that appeared in the early 20th century - things like Mann's 'Magic Mountain' or anything by Herman Hesse. You certainly don't expect postmodernist relativism, solipsism or materialism to be core elements in your average children's book - and to be honest - it isn't.The second volume of Sir Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed. It reads less like a right and wrong debate, however, and than it does a sensible, reasonable discussion, wherein one tries try to figure out how to live with other, perhaps opposing worldviews. The links between this world and ours, the daemons, and other parts of Pullman's universe were just as successful for me as in the original books, introducing here more of the self doubt and mental health challenges of emerging (and full) adulthood after the certainties of the 12(ish) year old Lyra and Will before.

Winner of many prestigious awards, including the Carnegie of Carnegies and the Whitbread Award, Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials has been acclaimed as a modern classic. When an act of terrible violence breaks the peace of the Oxford night, Lyra and Pan's relationship reaches a crisis and they are drawn, far from home, into the dangerous factions of a world they had no idea existed. The Secret Commonwealth' is again a narrative marked by journeys and supernatural encounters, as Lyra and other protagonists and antagonists involve themselves in an international web of intrigue involving the Magisterium and more dust-related shenanigans in Central Asia. He is best known for the trilogy of books known as His Dark Materials, which won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. It features Lyra Silvertongue as a twenty-year-old undergraduate, [3] travelling to Central Asia via the Levant.The Secret Commonwealth is truly a book for our times; a powerful adventure and a thought-provoking look at what it is to understand yourself, to grow up and make sense of the world around you. This article covers a subject that is part of the real world; thus, it should not be taken as a part of the HDM multiverse. The Secret Commonwealth of the title refers to things that are outside the realm of rational thought, such as ghosts, fairies, and superstition.

It's not perfect by any means - you get the feeling that Pullman is so intimately entwined with the myriad strands of the universe that he's created that he struggles to let anything go - and there is an insertion into the narrative of an element from one of the mini spin off books he wrote that feels a little clumsy - even if the eventual pay off is one of those jaw dropping imaginative feats that we've come to expect from him. It was set twenty years after the events of La Belle Sauvage, and roughly ten years after the events of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

The first book in The Book of Dust trilogy, La Belle Sauvage , is coming to the stage in the summer of this year. As she makes her way further East, we are treated with a handful of increasingly extraordinary vignettes that demonstrate the diverse ways humans and dæmons relate to one another. With that said, I don’t think that either Delamare or Olivier is really supposed to be that menacing. The Secret Commonwealth begins years after the events of His Dark Materials, and Lyra is 20 years old now, a college student.