Now a major critically acclaimed BBC series This special collection features all three titles in the award-winning trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights Lyra Belacqua lives half-wild and carefree among the scholars of Jordan College, with her daemon familiar always by her side. But the arrival of her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, draws her to the heart of a terrible struggle - a struggle born of Gobblers and stolen children, witch clans and armoured bears. The Subtle Knife Lyra finds herself in a shimmering, haunted otherworld - Cittagazze, where soul-eating Spectres stalk the streets and wingbeats of distant angels sound against the sky. But she is not without allies: twelve-year-old Will Parry, fleeing for his life after taking another's, has also stumbled into this strange new realm. On a perilous journey from world to world, Lyra and Will uncover a deadly secret: an object of extraordinary and devastating power. And with every step, they move closer to an even greater threat - and the shattering truth of their own destiny. The Amber Spyglass Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest war that has ever been - and a journey to a dark place from which no one has ever returned . . .

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, a stunning biography of one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of political and royal life. George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), was loved by three monarchs. King James I of England, whose bed-fellow he was, called him Steenie, after St Stephen whose face ‘was as the face of an angel’. James’s son, later King Charles I, equally enthralled by Buckingham’s glamour, made him his best friend and mentor. Anne of Austria, the Queen of France, confessed that ‘if an honest woman might love someone other than her husband’ then Buckingham would have been her choice. Many believed that he was her lover. Buckingham was a dazzling figure. On horse-back, or cutting capers, he displayed a figure whose grace not even his worst enemies could refuse to acknowledge. He was also a skilful player of the political game, who rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. When he travelled to Paris to fetch home Charles’s bride, Queen Henrietta Maria, he wore a pearl-encrusted suit worth enough to pay and equip a sizable army. By the time he was thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings. He lived in dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality. Buckingham stood at its centre both culturally and politically. To the House of Commons Buckingham was ‘the chief cause’ of all the ‘evils and mischiefs with which the country is afflicted’. When he was assassinated in 1628, at the age of thirty-six, King Charles said that he himself, and the monarchy he represented, had been ‘wounded through the Duke’s sides’. All of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s books have explored the interface between actual events in the world of politics, war and international relations, and the operations of imagination and desire. Buckingham will, first and foremost, be a compelling story, but it is also story rich in significance, with deep resonance for today.

Not since Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber have old stories been made to feel so electrically new. Not since Wim Winders' Wings of Desire have the numinous and the everyday been so magically combined. It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she'll ever find love. They're ordinary people, preoccupied, as we all are now, by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #metoo. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore. The ancients invented myths to express what they didn't understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Origo's diaries, trenchantly and pithily written, are a glory' Spectator

'Many marvellously human touches in these pages provide vivid authenticity' Daily Telegraph

Iris Origo never quite felt she belonged anywhere. One of the twentieth century's great diarists, she was born in England in 1902, moving between Ireland, Italy and America as a child. It was only when she married an Italian man that she came to rest in one country. Fifteen years later, that country would be at war with her own.

The gripping precursor to War in Val d'Orcia, her bestselling classic diary, A Chill in the Air is Origo's devastating account of how Italy stumbled into conflict in 1940. Through her connections with all of society - from the peasants on her estate to the US ambassador - she uncovers the turmoil, the danger, and the grim absurdities the country faced as war became more and more inevitable.

'One of the best novels of the year so far' The Times A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Unlike anything I've read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It's wonderful' Tessa Hadley 'I just enjoyed it so very much' Philip Pullman It is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate. Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all. Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood. From the multi-award-winning author of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.

The only hardcover omnibus of the best-selling and award-winning fantasy trilogy, in a Contemporary Classics edition.
Philip Pullman's trilogy is a masterpiece that transcends genre and appeals to readers of all ages. His heroine, Lyra, is an orphan living in a parallel universe in which science, theology, and magic are entwined. The epic story that takes us through the three novels is not only a spellbinding adventure featuring armored polar bears, magical devices, witches, and daemons, it is also an audacious and profound reimagining of Milton's "Paradise Lost "that has already inspired a number of serious books of literary criticism. Like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis before him, Pullman has invented a richly detailed and marvelously imagined world, complex and thought-provoking enough to enthrall adults as well as younger readers. An utterly entrancing blend of metaphysical speculation and bravura storytelling, "His Dark Materials "is a monumental and enduring achievement.

THE TIMES BIOGRAPHY OF THE DECADE WINNER OF THE 2013 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION WINNER OF THE 2013 COSTA BOOK AWARDS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR The story of Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, daredevil - and Fascist. In September 1919 Gabriele D'Annunzio, successful poet and occasional politician, declared himself Commandante of the city of Fiume in modern day Croatia. His intention - to establish a utopia based on his fascist and artistic ideals. It was the dramatic pinnacle to an outrageous career. Lucy Hughes-Hallett charts the controversial life of D'Annunzio, the debauched artist who became a national hero. His evolution from idealist Romantic to radical right-wing revolutionary is a political parable. Through his ideological journey, culminating in the failure of the Fiume endeavour, we witness the political turbulence of early 20th century Europe and the emergence of fascism. In 'The Pike', Hughes-Hallett addresses the cult of nationalism and the origins of political extremism - and at the centre of the book stands the charismatic D'Annunzio: a figure as deplorable as he is fascinating.