About the Author

Philip Pullman is one of the most acclaimed writers working today. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. He is also the author of another trilogy set in the same world, The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage, The Secret Commonwealth, and The Rose Field) as well as numerous other much-loved novels, a collection of fairy tales, and a volume of essays and speeches on writing. He has won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread (now Costa) Award, Parents’ Choice Gold Awards, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Pullman was knighted for services to literature in the New Years Honours 2019. He lives in Oxford, England.

Reviews

“The Secret Commonwealth is a majestic return to Lyra’s next chapter with all the magic, folklore, and fantasy only Philip Pullman can provide.” –Hypable
 
“A big novel full of big ideas, big characters and big sorrows. . . This book feels like a response to the darkness of our time.”—NPR

“Pullman’s best novel so far. A work of extraordinary depth and humanity.” —The Observer

“As always, Pullman’s writing is simple, unpretentious, beautiful, true. . . . the conclusion to the Book of Dust can’t come soon enough.” —The Washington Post
 
“The novel gallops forward, full of danger, delight and surprise. Pullman is a staggeringly gifted storyteller.” —New Statesman

“Engrossing.”—Financial Times
 
“Exhilarating.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Enthralling.”—Readings
 
“Mr. Pullman’s writing is clear, clean and forceful, never striving for effect and all the more effective because of it. He’s also a man of ideas, which gives great savor to his work.” – The Wall Street Journal
 
“Coming back to [Lyra] after all these years is such a profound pleasure that I can do nothing but sit back and watch her charge forward into the night, ready as she always was to remake the world in her own image.”—Vox

“Profound and provocative.” —Bulletin

“The Secret Commonwealth reasserts Pullman’s affection for the wondrous and those pieces of reality which can be seen only by those willing to see.”—Newsweek

“These books, and the intellectual debate they produce, make Lyra’s world feel more lived-in than ever before.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Not only is it worthy second installment in The Book of Dust trilogy, it continues to prove this sequence will be every bit as excellent as His Dark Materials.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer