His Dark Materials: Northern Lights x 6

We have selected Northern Lights as our 7-11 and Teen Book of the Month this November – a true classic full of the joys that reading can bring. Voted the best-loved Carnegie Medal winner of the past 70 years, the book that launched Philip Pullman to global fame will also be screened on BBC TV this Christmas.

Bursting with richness and marvels, it’s a sweeping adventure that whisks children from the dreaming spires of Oxford into the Arctic wilderness, all within a fascinating alternative world subtly different from our own. It deals with important issues of family, friendship, self-discovery and the meaning and purpose of life. It fuses thrilling danger and vivid characters with life’s great mysteries, helping children make the crucial step from middle-grade fiction to fully fledged readers of longer books, who are alive to the pleasures of reading. It’s hugely ambitious and highly literary, yet also serves up all the nail-biting thrills any child could want. Essentially, this is the sort of book that once you’ve read it, you cannot imagine a world without it.

“Rarely, if ever, have readers been offered such a casket of wonders.” Independent

“Once in a lifetime a children’s author emerges who is so extraordinary that the imagination of generations is altered. Lewis Carroll, E Nesbit, CS Lewis and Tolkien were all of this cast. So too is Philip Pullman, whose Dark Materials trilogy will be devoured by anyone between eight and 80.” The New Statesman

Supplied as a pack of six copies.

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  • Photo of Philip Pullman

    Philip Pullman

    Philip Pullman is probably the world’s most acclaimed living children’s author, best known for the trilogy of books known as His Dark Materials.

    Awards

    Philip won the Nestle Smarties award for both Clockwork and The Firework Maker’s Daughter. Northern Lights was published in hardback in July 1995. That year, it won the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and was Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

    The Amber Spyglass won WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year 2000 at the British Book Awards, was Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal and was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2001. Philip Pullman was voted Whitaker Author of the Year by the Booksellers Association. The Amber Spyglass went on to win both Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 and in doing so became the first children’s book to win the main prize in the award’s history.

    Philip has also been recognised with two major awards for his contribution to literature: the Eleanor Farjeon award in 2002, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize in 2005.

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