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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The story is set twenty years or so after the events of La Belle Sauvage and ten years after the conclusion of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Lyra begins to realise that it is what she has left behind in her childhood (and in the original His Dark Materials trilogy). 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. Exclusive to the paperback edition, Chris Wormell’s new original illustrations bring Lyra’s world vividly to life. He has created a fantasy world, made yet more satisfying in this new volume and pursued with his own special rigour and stylistic elegance.

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. 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. 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. Jordan College's new master, a pharmaceutical executive, tells Lyra that she must give up her rooms.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. Just loved it😍 I'm a huge fan of His Dark Materials ✨ and The Book of Dust's Trilogy and eagerly waiting for the 3rd volume to release, can't wait to put hands on it! 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. The main negative I had with the book was the way people spear off randomly in different directions, often internationally. And an enormous part of that pull is thanks to Lyra, who felt like a thoroughly modern heroine in 2000 and continues to feel like one now, nearly two decades later.

The Secret Commonwealth of the title refers to things that are outside the realm of rational thought, such as ghosts, fairies, and superstition. Here we get a good deal of ecclesiastical power politics, with the deliciously Machiavellian Marcel Delamere eliminating rivals and concentrating power in his own hands. Strauss keeps this information from the Magisterium, as they will certainly consider the rose industry to be heretical. Most recently, he has illustrated the cover of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust , and has lent his woodcut style to Dinosaurium . Other volumes related to His Dark Materials: Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, and The Collectors.Lyra must find her daemon again to put herself back in touch with it, to rediscover Blakean innocence. It was a time when children were allowed to roam anywhere, to play in the streets, to wander over the hills, and he took full advantage of it. Pullman has successfully turned his heroine into an adult by making her remember herself as a child, which also means remembering the earlier books that we all loved.

She has become very intellectual and a little solemn and has fallen out with her daemon, Pantalaimon. But soon enough Pullman pulls the rug out from under us yet again as we realize that she has changed. 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. Delamare consolidates his power and Malcolm continues his investigations, learning about Delamare’s background, intentions and interests in the rose industry from Bonneville. That’s the first and most important thought that swept through me when I opened up The Secret Commonwealth, the second volume in Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy.

We keep going back to the Maison Juste in Geneva, the world centre for “the examination of heresy and heretics”. From the author of the phenomenal His Dark Materials comes the next chapter in the story of Lyra Silvertongue . It's more like The Force in Star Wars than the organised religion that Pullman aims his sights at clearly here, as he did in the older trilogy. 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. And there are other, similar moments that pop up again and again throughout The Secret Commonwealth, most notably when Lyra travels to this world’s version of the Middle East for the first time and is immediately sexually assaulted.

Lyra meets an alchemist in Prague, witnesses an assassination in Constantinople, narrowly avoids being killed in Smyrna. Pantalaimon confronts the author Gottfried Brande at his home in Wittenberg, but is forced to leave when Brande pointedly ignores him. She was practical and kind and relentless, and I had never read any character quite like her before. She learns about their experiences in a long series of bittersweet stories about all the ways there are to lose a part of yourself, and all the ways in which you have to go on living afterward.

The desert of Karamakan, where the industry is centred, is difficult to access and all visitors are forced to leave their dæmons behind. One man who suffers from a melancholy like Lyra’s tells her that he looks for his dæmon everywhere he goes, that he is haunted by a dread “that I will see her with a man who is me, who is my double. The book’s gripping opening chapter moves between sinister machinations among leaders of the church in Geneva, and a clumsy murder in night-time Oxford. 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. He has also won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for The Golden Compass (and the reader-voted "Carnegie of Carnegies" for the best children's book of the past seventy years); the Whitbread (now Costa) Award for The Amber Spyglass; a Booker Prize long-list nomination (The Amber Spyglass); Parents' Choice Gold Awards (The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass); and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in honor of his body of work.