Once Upon A Time in the North
Set in the years preceding the events of 'Northern Lights,' this tale introduces us to Lee Scoresby, a 24-year-old Texan aeronaut and future friend to Lyra Belacqua.
Lee has won himself a poker game and, with it, a hot-air balloon of his very own. He finds himself floating North to the windswept Arctic island of Novy Odense, where he and his hare daemon Hester are quickly tangled in a deadly plot involving oil magnate Larsen Manganese, corrupt mayoral candidate Ivan Poliakov, and Lee’s longtime nemesis from the Dakota Country: Pierre McConville, a hired killer with at least twenty murders to his name. Lee forms an alliance with one of the island’s reviled armoured bears that he can fight to break up the conspiracy in a shoot-out and battle of wits.
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.