Northern Lights

Philip Pullman's young adult fantasy novel Northern Lights, the opening volume of His Dark Materials, was published by Scholastic UK in 1995. Under the title The Golden Compass it appeared in North America and some other countries, and the Library Association gave it the 1995 Carnegie Medal, which recognises the year's best British children's book. It was adapted as a feature film in 2007 and as the first part of a television series in 2019.

The setting is a parallel universe, and the narrative follows Lyra Belacqua northwards to the Arctic, where she looks for Roger Parslow, the friend who has disappeared, and for Lord Asriel, whose experiments there concern a mysterious substance called Dust. Every person in her world has a daemon, an animal companion that is part of them, and twelve-year-old Lyra runs wild around Jordan College in Oxford under the guardianship of its Master. She overhears a plan to poison the wine intended for Asriel, and warns him.

When Roger disappears and Asriel is reported to be in the Arctic, Lyra is taken north by a woman who is not the ally she pretends to be. She travels with a truth-telling device she has not learned to read, a family of armoured bears and children who have been separated from their daemons. Behind the adventure is a research programme run by the Church and an opening into another world.

Northern Lights is the opening volume of a trilogy that continues in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and it introduces Lyra, her daemon Pantalaimon and the substance at the centre of the series. It is told from Lyra's point of view.