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, 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 has also
won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for The
Golden Compass (and the reader-voted "Carnegie of Carnegies" for
the best children's book of the past seventy years); the Whitbread
(now Costa) Award for The Amber Spyglass; a Booker Prize long-list
nomination (The Amber Spyglass); Parents' Choice Gold Awards (The
Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass); and the Astrid Lindgren
Memorial Award, in honor of his body of work. In 2004, he was
appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
It has recently been announced that The Book of Dust, the much
anticipated new book from Mr. Pullman, also set in the world of His
Dark Materials, will be published as a major work in three parts,
with the first part to arrive in October 2017.
Philip Pullman is the author of many other much-lauded novels.
Other volumes related to His Dark Materials: Lyra’s Oxford, Once
Upon a Time in the North, and The Collectors. For younger readers:
I Was a Rat!; Count Karlstein; Two Crafty Criminals; Spring-Heeled
Jack, and The Scarecrow and His Servant. For older readers: the
Sally Lockhart quartet: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the
North, The Tiger in the Well, and The Tin Princess; The White
Mercedes; and The Broken Bridge.
Philip Pullman lives in Oxford, England. To learn more, please
visit philip-pullman.com and hisdarkmaterials.com. Or follow him on
Twitter at @PhilipPullman.
“Mesmerizing . . . a taut adventure.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred
This comical adventure about a girl who longs to follow in her father's footsteps crackles with Pullman's (The Golden Compass; Clockwork) usual flair. Lila desperately wants to be a firework-maker like her widower father. Although he has raised her amid the dancing sparks, he wants her to have a husband rather than a vocation. With the help of her entrepreneurial friend Chulak, the personal servant to the king's talking white elephant, Lila tricks her father into revealing the secret to his profession, then bravely departs to retrieve the royal sulphur from Razvani the Fire-Fiend at the heart of a volcano. Pullman marries elements of fairy tale with slapstick humor as Lila outwits a vaudevillian band of pirates and scales jagged mountains on her quest. Gallagher's (Blue Willow, reviewed above) softly focused graphite drawings lend magical mystery as Lila fearfully contemplates the dancing fire imps at Mount Merapi and emphasize the absurdity as the elephant, his flanks emblazoned with advertisements, kneels before the Goddess of the Lake in order to save Lila from Razvani. If the tale, first published in Britain in 1995, isn't as polished as Pullman's other works, it's worth the trip just for the climactic fireworks scene in which Lila gets to show her stuff. Ages 8-12. (Oct.) FYI: As of September, Pullman's Sally Lockhart Trilogy is being reissued in paperback: The Ruby in the Smoke; The Shadow in the North; and The Tiger in the Well; as well as The Tin Princess, which features characters from the trilogy. (Knopf, $4.99 paper each ages 12-up ISBN 0-394-89589-4; -82599-3; ISBN 0-679-82671-8; -87615-4) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
"Mesmerizing . . . a taut adventure."-Kirkus Reviews, Starred
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