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Philip Pullman Books In Order

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Publication Order of His Dark Materials Books

Northern Lights / The Golden Compass (1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Subtle Knife (1997)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Amber Spyglass (2000)Description / Buy at Amazon
Lyra's Oxford (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
Once Upon a Time in the North (2008)Description / Buy at Amazon
Serpentine (2020)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Imagination Chamber (2022)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Collectors (2022)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of His Dark Materials Graphic Novels

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The Golden Compass: The Graphic Novel, Volume 1 (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Golden Compass: The Graphic Novel, Volume 2 (2015)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Subtle Knife Graphic Novel (2022)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Adventures Of John Blake Graphic Novels

Mystery of the Ghost Ship (2017)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Book Of Dust Books

La Belle Sauvage (2017)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Secret Commonwealth (2019)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Canongate Myths Books

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2009)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of New Cut Gang Books

Thunderbolt's Waxwork (1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Gas Fitters' Ball (1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Adventures of the New Cut Gang (2011)Description / Buy at Amazon
Two Crafty Criminals! (2012)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Sally Lockhart Books

The Ruby in the Smoke (1985)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Shadow in the North (1986)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Tiger in the Well (1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Tin Princess (1994)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

The Haunted Storm (1972)Description / Buy at Amazon
Galatea (1976)Description / Buy at Amazon
Count Karlstein (1982)Description / Buy at Amazon
How to Be Cool (1987)Description / Buy at Amazon
Spring-Heeled Jack (1989)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Broken Bridge (1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
The White Mercedes (1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Firework-Maker's Daughter (1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Clockwork, Or, All Wound Up (1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Butterfly Tattoo (1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
Mossycoat (1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
I Was a Rat! (1999)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Scarecrow and His Servant (2009)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Force of Evil (By: Shaun Tan,Gary Crew) (1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
Grimm Tales for Young and Old (2012)Description / Buy at Amazon
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (With: Jacob Grimm,Shaun Tan) (2012)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Golden Key: And Other Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (2012)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Plays

His Dark Materials (With: Nicholas Wright) (2005)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Picture Books

Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp (1999)Description / Buy at Amazon
Puss in Boots: The Adventures of That Most Enterprising Feline (2000)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (1978)Description / Buy at Amazon
Ancient civilizations (1979)Description / Buy at Amazon
Imaginary Friends (2017)Description / Buy at Amazon
Daemon Voices (2017)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Dramascripts Books

Werewolf (By: Adrian Flynn) (1642)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Valley of Fear (By: Adrian Flynn) (1915)Description / Buy at Amazon
All My Sons (By: Arthur Miller) (1947)Description / Buy at Amazon
Death of a Salesman (By: Arthur Miller) (1949)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Crucible (By: Arthur Miller) (1953)Description / Buy at Amazon
A View from the Bridge (By: Arthur Miller) (1955)Description / Buy at Amazon
Brother in the Land (By: Robert Swindells) (1984)Description / Buy at Amazon
Across the Barricades (By: Joan Lingard) (1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Question of Courage (By: Brian Keaney,Marjorie Darke) (1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
Paper Tigers (By: Steve Skidmore,Steve Barlow) (1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (By: Gene Kemp) (1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
Hot Cakes (By: Adrian Flynn) (1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
Burston School Strike (By: Roy Nevitt) (1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Tale of Two Cities (By: Steve Skidmore) (1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
Jane Eyre (By: Steve Skidmore,Steve Barlow) (1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Labyrinth: Play (By: David Calcutt) (2000)Description / Buy at Amazon
Working Parts (By: Nick Jones) (2000)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dracula (By: David Calcutt) (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Canterbury Tales (By: Martin Riley) (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Deamon Headmaster (By: Nick Stafford) (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (By: Terry Pratchett,Stephen Briggs) (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
Johnny and the Dead (By: Terry Pratchett) (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
Frankenstein (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
Lady Macbeth (By: David Calcutt) (2005)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Snake-Stone (By: Berlie Doherty) (2005)Description / Buy at Amazon
Doctor Faustus (By: Geraldine McCaughrean) (2006)Description / Buy at Amazon
Troy 24 (By: David Calcutt) (2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
The White Rose and the Swatiska (By: Adrian Flynn) (2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
Salem (By: David Calcutt) (2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Three Musketeers (By: Ken Ludwig) (2008)Description / Buy at Amazon
Cry, the Beloved Country (By: Roy Sargeant) (2008)Description / Buy at Amazon
Bog Child (By: Siobhan Dowd) (2008)Description / Buy at Amazon
Solace of the Road (By: Siobhan Dowd) (2009)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (By: Adrian Flynn) (2011)Description / Buy at Amazon
King of Shadows (By: Susan Cooper) (2011)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Invisible Man (By: Adrian Flynn) (2012)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Garbage King (By: Oladipo Agboluaje) (2013)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Devil Walks (By: Anne Fine) (2013)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Christmas Carol (By: Conor McReynolds,Richard Kidd) (2013)Description / Buy at Amazon
Our Day Out (By: Willy Russell) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Blood Brothers (By: Willy Russell) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Flesh and Blood (By: Benjamin Hulme-Cross) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dodger (By: Stephen Briggs) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Terrible Fate of Humpty Dumpty (By: David Calcutt) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Stone Cold (By: Robert Swindells) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Beowulf (By: David Calcutt) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Homer's Odyssey (By: David Calcutt) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Arson About (By: Mark Wheeller) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Treasure Island (By: David Calcutt) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Unman Wittering and Zigo (By: Giles Cooper) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Diary of Anne Frank (By: Frances Goodrich,Albert Hackett) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Hound of the Baskervill (By: John O'Connor) (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (By: David Calcutt) (2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
Cowgirl (By: G.R. Gemin) (2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Brotherhood of Smoke (By: Adrian Flynn) (2017)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Red Hot Reads Books

Ghost Stories (By: Robert Westall) (1988)Description / Buy at Amazon
Mystery (By: Helen Cresswell) (1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
Mystifying (By: Helen Cresswell) (1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
Mystery Stories (By: Helen Cresswell) (1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
Ballet Stories (By: Sally Holmes) (1997)Description / Buy at Amazon
Detective Stories (1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
Animal Stories (By: Michael Morpurgo) (1999)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Anthologies

Thirteen More Tales of Horror(1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
Life and Death(2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
Fantasy: Red Hot Reads(2004)Description / Buy at Amazon
Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think(2006)Description / Buy at Amazon
Whodunit?(2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
Four Tales(2010)Description / Buy at Amazon
First Light: A Celebration of Alan Garner(2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Gifts of Reading(2020)Description / Buy at Amazon

About Philip Pullman:

Philip Pullman is a British author who is best known for his young adult novels, most of which can be classed under the genre of fantasy fiction. Although he is a prolific writer with a long line of published books to his name, his most famous works are Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, which together comprise the His Dark Materials trilogy. Both critically and commercially successful, many of Philip Pullman’s novels have been adapted for television as well as the silver screen.

A Youth Spent in Travel

Philip Pullman was born on October 19, 1946 to Alfred O. Pullman, a Royal Air Force pilot, and his wife, Audrey Evelyn Pullman. While he was born in Norwich, England, he spent the first few years of his life travelling the world with his family, as his father was stationed to various posts. However, when Philip was barely seven years old, his father passed away in a plane crash while on active duty. His mother moved the family back to England, but soon remarried and took her son to Australia to start a new life.

As a child, Philip found himself fascinated by the world of comic book superheroes, and he would carry the moral lessons and grand narrative themes of good versus evil and cosmic battle into his own work. In 1957 Philip returned to the United Kingdom, where he continued his schooling in Gwynedd, Wales, although he spent a lot of time in Norfolk as well, under the care of his grandfather, who was a clergyman. The time he spent with his grandfather was pivotal to his later atheistic beliefs as well as the religious and moral themes that underlie his work.

University and the Academic Life

In 1963, Philip Pullman began his higher education at the prestigious Exeter College at Oxford University. However, despite his later success as a writer, he proved to be a mediocre student at best, barely graduating five years later with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Ironically enough, in later years Pullman reflected on his time as a student of English as not being very inspiring and clearly states that it was not an enjoyable experience for him.

In 1970, Philip Pullman married Judith Speller and settled down to life as a middle school teacher in North Oxford. While there, he wrote the first of many school plays and began work on his first published novel, The Haunted Storm. While it garnered him a coveted Young Writer’s Award, Pullman with his typical modesty refers to it as a poor effort, and for the most part shies away from discussing the novel.

Over the next several years, Pullman continued teaching at school and simultaneously worked on his plays and novels. He published a few more books over the next few years, most notably Galatea in 1976 and The Ruby in the Smoke, the first of his Sally Lockhart series, in 1986. With the publication and critical success of The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman became well-established as a writer of young adult fiction and was well on his way to becoming one of the most prodigious literary talents of our time.

Although he continued to teach, he gave up his permanent position as a middle school teacher in 1988 and took a position as a part-time instructor at Oxford’s Westminster College. While he continued to create plays for school children, he also began work on a series of more adult novels at this time, the first of which was published in 1995. Entitled The Northern Lights, it was the first book of his seminal trilogy, His Dark Materials and gained him critical acclaim as well as a number of literary awards, including the highly prestigious Carnegie Medal.

The Northern Lights

The Northern Lights is the first installment in the chronicles of a young English girl named Lyra Belacqua, who lives in a parallel universe dominated by the authority and tyranny of a body known as the Magesterium, which forms a theocracy that is single-mindedly devoted to the ruthless suppression of anything they deem to be heresy. It is a complicated world, in which humans lives with a disjointed soul that is embodied in the form of an animal companion, called a daemon. In this world, each human has a daemon of their own that accompanies them throughout their life – the daemon is an integral part of the human being it is attached to, and no human can survive detached from their daemon.

The plot centers on Lyra’s quest to find her Uncle Asriel, a scientist who has incurred the wrath of the Magesterium for pursuing his research into a substance he calls Dust. During a visit to his niece, he disappears mysteriously through a portal into a parallel universe. Around the same time, Lyra’s best friend Roger disappears as well and the young heroine is convinced that his disappearance is connected to the activities of a shadow group called the Gobblers. Determined to find her friend and her uncle, Lyra embarks on a quest to save them, aided by her daemon and an alethiometer, a four-sided compass which points her unerringly to the truth.

Over the course of a series of adventures, Lyra finds her uncle, only to discover that he is really her father and that his purpose all along was to use Roger to his advantage. In the final act of the novel, Lord Asriel severs Roger from his daemon and the resultant violent energy causes a massive explosion to rip through time and space, opening the door for Asriel to enter the parallel universe he has been searching for. As he enters the portal, he vows to find the Dust and destroy it. However, Lyra knows now that her father cannot be trusted, and suspecting that the Dust is worth protecting, she enters the void along with her daemon to stop her father from carrying out his plans.

Published in America as The Golden Compass, The Northern Lights was adapted into a major Hollywood motion picture in 2007, starring such heavyweights as Nicole Kidman and Ian McKellan. However, box office reviews were mixed and any plans to adapt the remaining works in the series into movies have been put on hold indefinitely.

The Subtle Knife

The Subtle Knife is the second in the His Dark Materials trilogy and continues the story of Lyra Belacqua’s adventures. The story continues to revolve around Lyra’s attempts to find and stop her father, this time with the aid of a young boy named Will Parry, who accidentally fell through the door into Lyra’s parallel universe. Lyra and Will join forces to find Will’s father, later revealed to be the mysterious adventurer Stanislaus Grumman, and stop Lord Asriel. However, they face a serious threat from the council of witches who have banded together under the command of Lyra’s mother, Mrs. Coulter, in order to support the cause of the evil Lord Asriel. Matters are further complicated by the discovery of a knife, which when wielded by its true guardian can protect people from the evil Spectres, which prey on the souls of people in this parallel universe. Will finds that he is the true guardian of the knife and the young protagonists struggle to keep this vitally valuable weapon from Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter. As the book winds to a close, Lyra disappears, leaving behind her prized alethiometer. Determined to find her, Will continues on his journey, temporarily abandoning his quest for Lord Asriel.

Criticism and Atheism

Like most of his works, the His Dark Materials trilogy has received rave reviews and a great deal of critical acclaim. However, Pullman’s blatantly anti-theistic views have caused more religiously conservative readers to criticize his work somewhat harshly. An avowed atheist and philosopher, Pullman takes these criticisms in stride, arguing that his goal is to present a new interpretation of the typical religious duality, presenting the world in shades of grey where morality is really in the eye of the beholder.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Philip Pullman

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