Northern Lights
core novel 1995 His Dark Materials
Record
| First published | 1995 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.03 (1,639,207 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| Page count | 399 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780439994927 |
| First-edition publisher | Scholastic |
| First-edition country | UK |
Synopsis
The opening novel of the trilogy is set in a parallel Oxford where every person's soul takes the visible form of an animal companion called a daemon, and a powerful religious authority known as the Magisterium polices belief and inquiry. Twelve-year-old Lyra Belacqua lives largely unsupervised among the scholars of Jordan College until she overhears talk of a mysterious substance called Dust and witnesses events that unsettle her guardians. When children from Lyra's world begin disappearing, taken by shadowy figures known as Gobblers, and her friend Roger is among the missing, Lyra sets out for the far north to find him. Guided by her alethiometer, and joined along the way by seafaring Gyptians, an armored bear, and other allies, she is drawn deeper into a conspiracy involving her own family and the nature of Dust itself.
Where it sits
- Universe: His Dark Materials
- Series: His Dark Materials (trilogy) core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Philip Pullman
Awards (verified)
- Carnegie Medal, 1995: won
- Carnegie of Carnegies (70th-anniversary public vote), 2007: won; Voted best Carnegie Medal winner of the award's first 70 years.
Notes
- US title: The Golden Compass (Knopf, 1996). Carnegie Medal 1995; 'Carnegie of Carnegies' 2007.
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 His Dark Materials (trilogy): position 1 of 3: next The Subtle Knife (1997)
Sources
← His Dark Materials dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.