His Dark Materials

His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights (1995; published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. In 2003, the trilogy was ranked third on the BBC's The Big Read poll. Although His Dark Materials has been marketed as young adult fiction, and the central characters are children, Pullman wrote with no target audience in mind. The fantasy elements include witches and armoured polar bears; the trilogy also alludes to concepts from physics, philosophy, and theology. It functions in part as a retelling and inversion of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, in which Pullman commends humanity for what Milton saw as its most tragic failing, original sin. The trilogy has attracted controversy for its criticism of religion. By 2024, more than 22 million copies of the novels had been sold in 50 countries, and they had been translated into 40 languages. The books have been dramatised several times. BBC Radio 4 produced a three-part full-cast dramatisation in 2003, as did RTÉ the same year. The London Royal National Theatre staged a two-part adaptation of the trilogy in 2003–2004. New Line Cinema released a film adaptation of Northern Lights, The Golden Compass, in 2007. A television series, based on the trilogy and produced by Bad Wolf, was broadcast by the BBC and HBO between November 2019 and February 2023. Pullman followed the trilogy with four short works set in the Northern Lights...