His Dark Materials

His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights (1995; published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. In 2003, the trilogy was ranked third on the BBC's The Big Read poll.

Although His Dark Materials has been marketed as young adult fiction, and the central characters are children, Pullman wrote with no target audience in mind. The fantasy elements include witches and armoured polar bears; the trilogy also alludes to concepts from physics, philosophy, and theology. It functions in part as a retelling and inversion of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, with Pullman commending humanity for what Milton saw as its most tragic failing, original sin. The trilogy has attracted controversy for its criticism of religion.

The books have been dramatised several times. BBC Radio 4 produced a three-part full-cast dramatisation in 2003 as did RTÉ the same year. The London Royal National Theatre staged a two-part adaptation of the trilogy in 2003–2004. New Line Cinema released a film adaptation of Northern Lights, The Golden Compass, in 2007. A BBC commissioned television series, based on the trilogy and produced by Bad Wolf, was broadcast by both the BBC and HBO between November 2019 and February 2023.

Pullman followed the trilogy with four short works set in the Northern Lights universe: Lyra's Oxford, (2003); Once Upon a Time in the North, (2008); The Collectors (2014); and the latest Serpentine, (2020). A new trilogy, also set in the same universe as Northern Lights, titled The Book of Dust, was published beginning 19 October 2017 with the release of the first novel La Belle Sauvage; the second book, The Secret Commonwealth, was released in October 2019. On 29 April 2025, the title of the final novel was revealed to be The Rose Field and a release date of 23 October 2025 was confirmed.