The Book of Dust Summary
Philip Pullman

The Book of Dust Overview

Set in the same world as the best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy and about a decade before, author Philip Pullman returns to tell the story of Lyra when she was just a baby in Oxford. La Belle Sauvage, the first volume in a planned trilogy called The Book of Dust, is told from the third-person perspective of an 11-year-old boy named Malcolm Polstead in Gostow, a village just outside Oxford, where Malcolm and his daemon Asta become embroiled in the larger events happening around him when he accidentally finds a coded carved acorn and witnesses its carrier's murder. Suddenly, young Malcolm is spying for the organization Oakley Street while trying to evade the Consortial Court of Discipline. All the while, he worries about baby Lyra, who is hidden in the priory across the river from Malcolm's home. When a raging flood sweeps through most of England, Malcolm and 16-year-old Alice set off by boat to London to deliver Lyra safely to her father Lord Asriel.