La Belle Sauvage
core novel 2017 His Dark Materials
Record
| First published | 2017 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.15 (116,204 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 449 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780375815300 |
| First-edition date | 2017-10-19 |
| First-edition country | UK |
Synopsis
Set roughly a dozen years before the events of the original trilogy, this prequel follows eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead, who helps his parents run an Oxford inn near a priory where nuns are looking after an infant given into their care -- Lyra Belacqua. Malcolm strikes up an unlikely alliance with Alice, an older girl working at the inn, and with Hannah Relf, a scholar secretly opposing the Magisterium. When a catastrophic flood strikes the region just as sinister figures, including a Magisterium enforcement agent and a predatory stranger named Bonneville, take an interest in the baby, Malcolm and Alice flee downriver by canoe with Lyra, navigating flooded towns and supernatural dangers while trying to reach safety and keep her out of the hands of those pursuing her.
Where it sits
- Universe: His Dark Materials
- Series: The Book of Dust core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Philip Pullman
Notes
- From the series record (The Book of Dust): Completed by The Rose Field, 23 Oct 2025.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Book of Dust: position 1 of 3: next The Secret Commonwealth (2019)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Dust
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Sauvage
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Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.