When readers first met her in The Golden Compass (first published in the U.K. in 1995 as Northern Lights), Lyra Belacqua was a young orphan, hiding in a wardrobe at Oxford’s Jordan College, spying on the scholars she lived among in a world with some parallels to our own. Now, after five epic novels in two series (His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust) that sent Lyra and those around her traveling between worlds, her story will come to an end with The Rose Field by Philip Pullman, due out simultaneously in the U.K. from David Fickling Books (in association with PRH UK), and in the U.S. from the Knopf imprint of Random House Children’s Books, on October 23.
The last volume of the Book of Dust trilogy follows The Secret Commonwealth, which was published in 2019. The Rose Field picks up immediately after that story left off; Lyra, now a young woman, is in the desert on a dangerous search for Pan, her dæmon, from whom she has been separated after a devastating falling-out. Along with Lyra’s friend and protector Malcolm Polstead, the book sees the return of a host of familiar characters, including the nefarious Marcel Delamare, the mysterious Men from the Mountains, rogue scientists, scholars, spies, troops of witches, and other people of the air.
“I think of The Rose Field as partly a thriller and partly a bildungsroman: a story of psychological, moral, and emotional growth,” Pullman said in a statement. “But it’s also a vision. Lyra’s world is changing, just as ours is. The power over people’s lives once held by old institutions and governments is seeping away and reappearing in another form: that of money, capital, development, commerce, exchange. Over a long and dangerous journey searching for her dæmon Pan and with him her lost imagination, Lyra comes to discover a new understanding of the world: that this change affects everything, from the way roads are built to the relationship people have with their deepest selves.”
Pullman’s U.S. editor Nancy Siscoe, senior executive editor at Knopf, calls The Rose Field “a tremendous gift” and a “grand achievement.” She told PW, “As only he can, Philip Pullman is using the language of fantasy to explore the deepest questions of what it means to be alive and awake to both the splendors and horrors around us. The story he’s telling is both timeless and stunningly prescient about our present moment.” The Rose Field has an initial North American print run of 300,000 copies. Pullman is currently putting finishing touches on the 672-page book, Siscoe says.
The audiobook edition of The Rose Field will be released simultaneously with the print edition; actor Michael Sheen will once again narrate. Sheen’s edition of La Belle Sauvage won Audiobook of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2018. In addition to The Rose Field, PRH UK has released 30th-anniversary editions of the audiobooks for the His Dark Materials series, read by Ruth Wilson, who starred as Mrs. Coulter in the BBC series adaptation. Additionally, there are full-cast recordings of His Dark Materials narrated by Philip Pullman.
Since Pullman’s His Dark Materials series debuted 30 years ago, it has become a cultural juggernaut. Collectively The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, plus four related shorter tales, and The Book of Dust books have sold more than 49 million copies in more than 35 territories. Lyra has been cited as an all-time favorite character among numerous reader polls, and the two series have been included in several lists of all-time best novels, as well as winning prestigious book awards including the Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights in 1995, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for The Amber Spyglass in 2000, and the Waterstones Book of the Year for La Belle Sauvage in December 2017.
Pullman’s novels inspired multiple adaptations across stage and screen, including a television series from HBO and BBC, and a feature film of The Golden Compass, released in 2007. Pullman was knighted for services to literature in 2019. A graduate of Exeter College, Oxford, he used his alma mater as inspiration and currently lives in Oxford. In addition to the Golden Compass and Book of Dust series, he’s the author of the Sally Lockhart series of Victorian thrillers that started with The Ruby in the Smoke in 1987. To date, he has published more than 35 books, as well as graphic novels, plays, and articles.
“It may be other things too, but I hope that fundamentally and permanently The Rose Field will be read as a story,” the author said. “I think of myself a storyteller rather than a novelist or a writer of literary fiction, belonging among the tellers of folk tales, fairy tales, ballads, and myths.”
