Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead and his daemon, Asta, live with his parents at the Trout Inn near Oxford. Across the River Thames (which Malcolm navigates often using his beloved canoe, a boat by the name of La Belle Sauvage) is the Godstow Priory where the nuns live. a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua . . .

Pullman is an easeful storyteller and an intricate and inventive world-builder, and everything he has to write is worth reading. -- Sam Leith * Telegraph *Fans of His Dark Materials will find themselves joyfully immersed in a familiar world of daemons, alethiometers, the evil Magisterium, friendly witches and foul night-ghasts, yet also delighted by Pullman's new material; meanwhile, awaiting first-time readers is all the pleasure of commencing their own journey into this most captivating of universes at the very beginning of Lyra's story. * Independent *No one else writes like Pullman . . . terrifying, transporting, exhilarating - and entirely worth the 17-year wait. -- Imogen Russell Williams * Metro *He is a master storyteller . . . Pullman creates a setting so evocative that I actually dreamed I was in it (my dog was my daemon). -- Rosamund Urwin * Evening Standard *I am confident in pronouncing that people will love the first volume of Philip Pullman's trilogy, The Book of Dust, with the same helpless vehemence that stole over them when The Golden Compass came out in the mid-'90s, or even when they first met their partners or held their newborn children . . . Reading this novel is like standing in a room in which suddenly all of the windows have blown open at once. * Slate *