Northern Lights (The Golden Compass)
When Lyra's friend Roger disappears, she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, set out to find him. The ensuing quest leads them to the bleak splendour of the North, where armoured bears rule the ice and witch-queens fly through the frozen skies - and where a team of scientists is conducting experiments too horrible to be spoken about.
Lyra overcomes these strange terrors, only to find something yet more perilous waiting for her - something with consequences which may even reach beyond the Northern Lights...
Please note: This book has also been published under the title 'The Golden Compass.'
Abraham Lincoln Award Nominee (2005); Young Adult Library Services Association Listen Up Award (1995); Carnegie Medal in Literature (1995); ALA's Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults (1997)
About the His Dark Materials Series
Books in series order
- 1.Northern Lights (The Golden Compass)(1995)
- 2.The Subtle Knife(1997)
- 3.The Amber Spyglass(2000)
- +Lyra's Oxford(2003)
- +Once Upon A Time in the North(2008)
Reading age: 10+ years
This series should be read in order.
In a world as convincing and thoroughly realised as Narnia, Earthsea, or Redwall, lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors. First, her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North. He leaves Lyra in the care of Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her.
Lyra sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger, bearing a rare truth-telling instrument known as the Golden Compass. All around her children are disappearing - victims of so-called 'Gobblers' - and being used as subjects in terrible experiments that separate humans from their daemons, creatures that reflect each person's inner being. And somehow, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved.