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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It’s beginning to seem that dæmons — and the possibility of hating one’s own dæmon — are at the center of The Book of Dust in the same way that bodies and the ecstasies and realities of the flesh turned out to be at the center of His Dark Materials. The big tell is probably their dæmons: I can barely remember anything about either Delamare’s or Olivier’s, while I will never forget Mrs.

As she flees the deadly theocrats, there are plenty of the thrills you might recognise from His Dark Materials, yet this is a long way from that work. Pantalaimon confronts the author Gottfried Brande at his home in Wittenberg, but is forced to leave when Brande pointedly ignores him. 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. Another product of technology that Philip can’t do without is Post-it Notes, the smallest yellow ones in particular. The second volume of Sir Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed.The reviews are varied, which just goes to show we all have different expectations, but for me this was a successfully more adult version of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, which are some of my favourite books.

This book elegantly weaves in live issues, from Europe's refugee crisis to facts in the post-truth era. Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, the second volume of The Book of Dust, Pullman does something riskier: he jumps forward 20 years – a decade on from the memorably sad, satisfyingly inevitable ending of The Amber Spyglass – to give us the story of Lyra as a young adult.He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. Some of his novels were based on plays he wrote for his school pupils, such as The Ruby In The Smoke. For older readers: the Sally Lockhart quartet: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well, and The Tin Princess; The White Mercedes; and The Broken Bridge. 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.

He enlists the help of a young alethometrist, Olivier Bonneville (son of Gerard Bonneville) to find Lyra, but Bonneville defies him and sets off without authority. It reads less like a right and wrong debate, however, and than it does a sensible, reasonable discussion, wherein one tries try to figure out how to live with other, perhaps opposing worldviews.

Imagination, the mysterious power celebrated by the Romantic poets, is the holy spirit of this book. As ever, Pullman’s story is complex and vast but home to some of the finest storytelling in the 21st century. The book follows several events in different locations (including Constantinople, Prague, Smyrna and Wittenberg) as well as organisations (the Magisterium, La Maison Juste and the brotherhood of the holy purpose) and several other minor characters ( Simon Talbot and Gottfried Brande).