La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One

The Book of Dust feels more earthbound — in the best way — than the earlier trilogy. The cosmic clockwork of "His Dark Materials," with its multiverses and metaphysics, becomes grounded in this new novel . . . But there is plenty of magic here, too, not just daemons and startling prophecies but witches and spectres, forays into Faerie, and Malcolm’s eerie, migraine-like visions of the aurora borealis. Too few things in our own world are worth a 17-year-wait: The Book of Dust is one of them

The Washington Post

A thrilling page turner that will fly off the shelves and delight his legion of fans . . . La Belle Sauvage introduces new characters to Pullman’s multiverse but stands equal to his earlier works in its quality of prose, layered world-building and breathtaking mastery of plot

Daily Express

Bold and brilliant

Sunday Mirror

Fans of His Dark Materials will find themselves joyfully immersed in a familiar world of daemons, alethiometers, the evil Magisterium, friendly witches and foul night-ghasts, yet also delighted by Pullman's new material; meanwhile, awaiting first-time readers is all the pleasure of commencing their own journey into this most captivating of universes at the very beginning of Lyra's story.

Independent

Full of acute observation. It is also a rich, imagantive, vividly characterised rite-of-passage tale . . . You scoot through its 560 pages like a canoe careering along on floodwaters

Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

Full of Pullman’s trademark imagination, adventure and scientific exploration

Sunday Express

He is a master storyteller . . . Pullman creates a setting so evocative that I actually dreamed I was in it (my dog was my daemon).

Rosamund Urwin, Evening Standard

High-octane adventure accompanies ingenious plotting during Lyra’s extended journey in a canoe down a dangerously flooded Thames

The Times

I am confident in pronouncing that people will love the first volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, The Book of Dust, with the same helpless vehemence that stole over them when The Golden Compass came out in the mid-’90s, or even when they first met their partners or held their newborn children . . . Reading this novel is like standing in a room in which suddenly all of the windows have blown open at once.

Slate

Is there a richer, more complex conceit in modern fiction than Pullman’s daemons – animal companions that are both a projection of yourself and a guide, both soul and guardian angel?

Frank Cottrell Boyce, Observer

It’s a stunning achievement, the universe Pullman has created and continues to build on. All that remains is to sit tight and wait for the next instalment.

New York Times

La Belle Sauvage is a feast of a book

Stylist

Much mythological material is being brewed: a predestined wonderful foundling, a child snatcher, a few treacherously beguiling spectres and perilous fairylands. Pullman’s immense powers of kinaesthetic visualisation keep the story pulsing on an epic scale

Marina Warner, Guardian

No one else writes like Pullman . . . terrifying, transporting, exhilarating - and entirely worth the 17-year wait.

Imogen Russell Williams, Metro

Pullman is an easeful storyteller and an intricate and inventive world-builder, and everything he has to write is worth reading.

Sam Leith, Telegraph

Pullman’s imagination is so enticing that any new window into it is welcome; and to connect once more with a fictional universe of such great power is a delight . . . I’m certainly eager for the next two parts of this new trilogy; there are, after all, many more worlds to conquer

Philip Womack, Financial Times

Pullman’s style is lively and physically specific, and the descriptions of the flood and its consequences are brilliantly done . . . Pullman is as a story­teller who wants to persuade us to start attending again to the connections that we have lost the ability to see

Rowan Williams, New Statesman

The first instalment of The Book of Dust is an utter joy. It is also generous, frightening, thrilling, clever and ingenious

Scotsman

These are dark, uncertain times. Pullman has given them the brilliant, disturbing book they deserve.

Marianne Levy

Thrillingly entertaining & beautifully written

Independent