Philip Pullman has revealed he will tell the final part of Lyra Silvertongue’s story in The Rose Field, which will come out this autumn.
It has been six years since a book about Lyra has been published – and 30 since readers first encountered her in Northern Lights, the first in Pullman’s His Dark Materials children’s fantasy trilogy. The bestselling novels, which have since been adapted intoa TV seriesby the BBC, take place across a multiverse and feature “dæmons” – physical manifestations of a person’s soul that take the form of animals.
The Rose Field will be the third volume in the author’s The Book of Dust series, which expands on the His Dark Materials trilogy. It began in 2017 with La Belle Sauvage, set 12 years before Northern Lights, and continued with The Secret Commonwealth in 2019, set after the events of the original trilogy. This new book will pick up where that one left off, with Lyra alone in the ruins of a deserted city, where she has gone in search of her dæmon. Another important character from the previous books, Malcolm, has travelled towards the Silk Roads to look for Lyra.
“Their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways,” reads the publisher’s description of The Rose Field. “They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new”.
Pullman said he thinks of the forthcoming book “as partly a thriller and partly a bildungsroman: a story of psychological, moral and emotional growth. But it’s also a vision. Lyra’s world is changing, just as ours is. The power over people’s lives once held by old institutions and governments is seeping away and reappearing in another form: that of money, capital, development, commerce, exchange.”
Above all, though, Pullman hopes “that fundamentally and permanently The Rose Field will be read as a story”.
“I think of myself a storyteller rather than a novelist or a writer of literary fiction, belonging among the tellers of folk tales, fairytales, ballads and myths,” he said.
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The author’s books have amassed a loyal fanbase over the years, with more than 49m copies of His Dark Materialsand the first two volumes of The Book of Dustsold globally so far. Commenting on the announcement of The Rose Field, head of books at Waterstones, Bea Carvalho, said: “One would be hard pressed to dream up a publication which could be met with such anticipation.”
David Fickling, Pullman’s longtime editor at David Fickling Books, which will be publishing the new novel in association with Penguin Random House, said he remembered the moment Pullman first showed him his “vision of a universe” that became His Dark Materials.
“‘What do you want to write next?’ I asked Philip Pullman over a bangers-and-mash editorial lunch in 1995,” he said. “‘Well, he said, I was thinking of setting a novel in the universe of John Milton, author of Paradise Lost.’ I nodded as if that was perfectly normal and then he began quoting effortlessly, gloriously, from that great poem.”
“Three thousand pages and 30 years later I realise without fear of contradiction that the publication of The Rose Field this autumn is a moment of cultural importance that reaches far beyond books,” Fickling added. Pullman “shows us a world brimming with wonder” and “gives us hope.”
In a first glimpse of the text of The Rose Field, Lyra is asked: “What will you do when you find this place in the desert, the opening to the world of the roses?”
“Defend it,” she replies. “Die defending it.”
The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume 3 will be published on 23 October 2025 (Penguin £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.