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Philip Pullman in Oxford.
More dark materials come to light … Philip Pullman in Oxford. Photograph: Michael Leckie
More dark materials come to light … Philip Pullman in Oxford. Photograph: Michael Leckie

Philip Pullman offers first look at His Dark Materials follow-up The Book of Dust

This article is more than 6 years old

Author is returning to his enchanted Oxford for more fantasy adventures involving his heroine Lyra and a boy called Malcolm

Exclusive extract: Read how Lyra’s story began

An 11-year-old boy called Malcolm Polstead – who lives in an inn on the banks of the river Thames in Oxford – will be at the centre of the first volume of Philip Pullman’s hotly anticipated new trilogy. The Book of Dust will be a companion trilogy to his global bestselling series His Dark Materials. Details of the first instalment, La Belle Sauvage, were revealed on Friday by Pullman’s publishers Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books.

An exclusive extract from the long-awaited novel has been published on the Guardian’s website, and will be printed in Saturday’s paper. Taken from chapter 10 of the new novel, available worldwide from 19 October, the extract finds one of the central characters from His Dark Materials, Lord Asriel, attempting to persuade Malcolm to let him see his infant daughter Lyra. The latter is being sheltered from the nobleman by nuns at Godstow Priory, near Oxford, after Asriel was convicted of murder.

Fans of the original series will be pleased to find that Asriel is as commanding a presence as he was in Northern Lights, the book that launched the original trilogy in 1995. The nobleman is accompanied by the snow leopard Stelmaria, his menacing “daemon”, as the animal embodiments of humans’ inner lives are called in the books.

Information regarding the plot and characters is being kept under wraps, but the publishers confirmed that other characters from the earlier series will appear. Among them are likely to be Lyra’s tragic friend Will Parry and Lyra’s mother, the sinister Mrs Coulter. The latter’s pursuit of Dust, the mysterious substance equated with original sin or Dark Matter, propelled the plot of the original trilogy.

Pullman teased fans that sharp-eyed readers of the first series will have spotted Malcolm before: “He had a walk-on part in another book, but I’m not saying which, and in any case you have to look carefully.” La Belle Sauvage, he added, referred to a canoe owned by Malcolm. “The canoe is important in this part of The Book of Dust, because some of the story is set during a massive flood.”

The canoe is named after a famous inn, inspired by a real medieval London tavern, which Malcolm explains had, hanging outside, “a picture of a beautiful lady, and she’d done something brave, but I don’t know what it was”.

Describing the new series as neither a sequel nor a prequel to His Dark Materials, but an “equel”, the former teacher said readers had taken to his original heroine, because she was “a very ordinary child”, who reflected many of the girls he met as a teacher. “They were brave, inquisitive, curious, disobedient: all those interesting things for storytellers,” he said.

Pullman gave no clue as to his inspiration for the character of Malcolm, but said: “I think the reason that people have read this long and complicated story is because they’re with Lyra. She doesn’t know the things that are threatening her and she’s in the same position as the reader, because the reader shares her sense of danger and excitement and curiosity about what’s going to happen next. I hope the same thing will be true of Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage.”

Pullman ended years of speculation in February when he announced that he was finally publishing The Book of Dust, 17 years after the final instalment of the original trilogy.

The new book shifts between Lyra’s birth and a period 10 years after the previous trilogy’s conclusion. When Pullman announced the book, he said that he had decided to return to Lyra’s Oxford because he wanted to get to the bottom of Dust and that “at the centre of The Book of Dust is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organisation, which wants to stifle speculation and inquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free”.

His Dark Materials consisted of three books – Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass – which became global bestsellers, notching up more than 17.5m sales worldwide. The books have been translated into 40 languages and adapted to film and stage. This year, the BBC will launch a television adaptation of His Dark Materials.

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