A quieter, less boisterous lead, Malcolm – with the help of his daemon Asta – works at his parents’ inn and spends time at the local nunnery, helping the sisters with small tasks and visiting the infant Lyra who has been entrusted to the nuns’ care. Enter Pullman’s new hero, Malcolm Polstead. A baby at the mercy of others, the feisty upstart who we first met in Northern Lights here has her agency reduced to the sporadic filling of her nappy. Indeed, in La Belle Sauvage, Lyra is not hopping anywhere. La Belle Sauvage (2017) is set some 10 years before Lyra began hopping from one universe to another like a bee skipping between spring flowers, drunk on the possibilities. His Dark Materials, however, will have played a large part in the formative years of many young readers and so the news of Philip Pullman’s return to Lyra’s Oxford will have been welcomed by many. By comparison, it is not difficult to see why Philip Pullman’s aggressively anti-religion, metaphysical adventures with more than a whiff of Milton about them might not have been the ‘box office’ smash to rival the Potter kid. ISBN: 9780857561084 SKU: 1444119 Note: Any image shown is from a stock photo and is not the actual book.Children’s fiction in the late-1990s and early-2000s was dominated by one series and one character: Harry Potter, the specky wizard whose greatest trick was filling bank accounts at the swish of a wand. This 2017 Penguin Books Paperback is in good condition. And Malcolm will brave any danger, and make shocking sacrifices, to bring her safely through the storm.

Lyra is the kind of person who draws people in like magnets. All are asking about the same thing: a girl-just a baby-named Lyra. When she asks Malcolm to keep his eyes open, he sees suspicious characters everywhere: the explorer Lord Asriel, clearly on the run enforcement agents from the Magisterium a gyptian named Coram with warnings just for Malcolm and a beautiful woman with an evil monkey for a daemon. He finds a secret message inquiring about a dangerous substance called Dust-and the spy it was intended for finds him. Malcolm and his daemon, Asta, routinely overhear news and gossip, and the occasional scandal, but during a winter of unceasing rain, Malcolm catches wind of something new: intrigue.

Malcolm's parents run an inn called the Trout, on the banks of the river Thames, and all of Oxford passes through its doors.

And so perhaps it was inevitable that he would become a spy. Malcolm Polstead is the kind of boy who notices everything but is not much noticed himself.

Philip pullman la belle sauvage