Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman's books feel cold and clear and full of argument, with children at the centre of questions adults have stopped asking. Start with Northern Lights (published in some places as The Golden Compass), where a girl in an Oxford of daemons and airships overhears a word and follows it north; The Subtle Knife then widens the story to a boy and a knife that opens doors between worlds.

Feels like wonder, freedom and adventure.

Start with Northern Lights.

Pullman was a schoolteacher for years before writing His Dark Materials; Jordan College is a fictional Oxford college, drawing on the real city where he studied.

A gift that looks like a compass but measures something else entirely.

It lay heavily in her hands, the crystal face gleaming, the golden body exquisitely machined. It was very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures, each of them painted with extraordinary precision, as if on ivory with the finest and slenderest sable brush. She turned the dial around to look at them all. There was an anchor; an hourglass surmounted by a skull; a chameleon, a bull, a beehive... Thirty-six altogether, and she couldn’t even guess what they meant.

Excerpt from Northern Lights, Philip Pullman, Doubleday Children's 1995. Quoted for discovery. Source Rights & removals