Accompanied by her daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.

Lyra and Will find themselves at the center of a battle between the forces of the Authority and those gathered by Lyra's father, Lord Asriel.

In a time before Lyra Silvertongue was born, the tough American balloonist Lee Scoresby and the great armoured bear Iorek Byrnison meet when Lee and his hare daemon Hester crash-land their trading balloon onto a port in the far Arctic North and find themselves right in the middle of a political powder keg.

"On a cold winter's night, two art collectors are settled before a fire in the senior common room of a college in Oxford, discussing two new unusual pieces--a portrait of a striking young woman and a bronze sculpture of a fearsome monkey. How could they imagine that they are about to be caught in the cross-fire of a story that has traveled across time and worlds..." -- In this darkly delicious sliver of a tale, Philip Pullman offers a glimpse of...