He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, the second volume of The Book of Dust, Pullman does something riskier: he jumps forward 20 years – a decade on from the memorably sad, satisfyingly inevitable ending of The Amber Spyglass – to give us the story of Lyra as a young adult. He taught courses on the Victorian novel and on the folk tale, and also a course examining how words and pictures fit together.

As ever, Pullman's story is complex and vast but home to some of the finest storytelling in the 21st century. This is a book for getting older with” Guardian, Book of the Week”The Secret Commonwealth is ablaze with light and life. Delamare consolidates his power and Malcolm continues his investigations, learning about Delamare’s background, intentions and interests in the rose industry from Bonneville. There is an incredibly brutal and much talked about attempted rape scene which certainly blots out much of the niceties of childhood innocence and adolescent love from the earlier books. Most recently, he has illustrated the cover of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust, and has lent his woodcut style to Dinosaurium.With it he sticks to the wall pictures, notes, posters, reminders, postcards, book jackets, anything that will stay there. I found the philosophy aspects interesting, I think part of the point is not knowing exactly what Pullman is referencing, and using our own imagination. Malcolm is 11 years older than Lyra and spent nearly all of La Belle Sauvage caring for her while she was a baby; now, he is a professor and she is a student, and also he was briefly her teacher when she was 15. Millions rely on Vox’s clear, high-quality journalism to understand the forces shaping today’s world. Revel in whole new worlds and enjoy one of literature’s most wonderful heroines before she comes to HBO and the BBC” stylist.

She was practical and kind and relentless, and I had never read any character quite like her before. The first book in The Book of Dust trilogy, La Belle Sauvage , is coming to the stage in the summer of this year. There's more to her story than you ever imagined and in The Secret Commonwealth Lyra has become an adult. As she flees the deadly theocrats, there are plenty of the thrills you might recognise from His Dark Materials, yet this is a long way from that work.

She has become very intellectual and a little solemn and has fallen out with her daemon, Pantalaimon. It opens with a contrarian epigraph from Blake: “Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of the truth. Pullman, also set in the world of His Dark Materials, will be published as a major work in three parts, with the first part to arrive in October 2017. 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. Imagination, the mysterious power celebrated by the Romantic poets, is the holy spirit of this book.

Our own refugee crises and confrontations with Islamic fundamentalism (here “the brotherhood of the holy purpose”) have their ready analogies in his fictional universe. Philip Pullman is just amazing as always, and the universe he had created and continues to build on id just outstanding!Malcolm learns that the "men from the mountains" are funded by pharmaceutical companies intent on controlling the supply of rose oil. A paranoid gent at a central European railway station or a wizened old lady in a Levantine port only has to mention a distant destination for Lyra or Malcolm to hurtle off towards it.

These books have been honoured by several prizes including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Book Prize, and (for The Amber Spyglass) the Whitbread Book of the Year Award - the first time that prize had been given to a children's book. It was quite invisible to everyday vision … it was seen by the imagination, whatever that was, and not by logic. Other volumes related to His Dark Materials: Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, and The Collectors.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!