The Subtle Knife
Lyra and her new-found friend, Will, tumble separately into the strange tropical otherworld of Cittàgazze, "the city of magpies," where adults are curiously absent and children run wild.
Here their lives become inextricably entwined when Lyra's alethiometer gives her a simple command: find Will's father. Their search is plagued with obstacles - some familiar and some horribly new and unfathomable - but it eventually brings them closer to Will's father and to the Subtle Knife, a deadly, magical, ancient tool that cuts windows between worlds. Through it all, Will and Lyra find themselves hurtling toward the centre of a fierce battle against a force so awesome that leagues of mortals, witches, beasts, and spirits from every world are uniting in fear and anger against it.
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.