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)

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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.

Protected by the gyptians, Lyra speaks to Coram van Texel for advice and is given a little stick to defend herself. La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his planned trilogy The Book of Dust, was a prequel, telling how, as a baby, Lyra Belacqua was saved from the deadly agents of the Magisterium, the authoritarian church that is always seeking to extend its powers. And because Pantalaimon is part of Lyra — her soul, taking the form of a pine marten to whom she can talk — that means she no longer really likes herself. Bonneville, using the nauseating new method of reading the alethiometer, realises that Lyra and Pan are separated. 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.Pan meets a young refugee named Nur Huda el-Wahabi who has lost her dæmon, and they decide to travel together to the Blue Hotel. 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.

He is caught by Bonneville, but manages to escape when Bonneville is briefly arrested by Magisterium agents. The early part of his life was spent travelling all over the world, because his father and then his stepfather were both in the Royal Air Force. From the author of the phenomenal His Dark Materials trilogy comes the next chapter in the story of Lyra Silvertongue . The Secret Commonwealth begins years after the events of His Dark Materials, and Lyra is 20 years old now, a college student.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.

But while I occasionally found myself wincing as I read The Secret Commonwealth, the book always kept pulling me inexorably forward. As if to illustrate the point, the other half of this book consists of following Malcolm Polstead, our main character in La Belle Sauvage, now a professor and somewhat of a spy and man of action. Between then and now, Pullman has given Lyra a starring role in a couple of novellas, slight little things that mostly existed as a chance to revisit the rich mythology of the world of dæmons and witches in which she lives.First, there’s Marcel Delamare, Lyra’s estranged uncle who blames her for the death of her mother, his sister, the diabolical Mrs. Exclusive to the paperback edition, Chris Wormell's new original illustrations bring Lyra's world vividly to life. 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. As ever, Pullman's story is complex and vast but home to some of the finest storytelling in the 21st century. Following an auction to raise money for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, Pullman confirmed that he would name a character in The Secret Commonwealth after Nur Huda El-Wahab, a victim of the fire.