The Dante of the Twentieth Century

This compelling, prophetic novel anticipates the insanity of modern bureaucracy and the coming of totalitarianism

It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing

It was Kafka who made me understand that one can write differently

Where Yoko Ogawa's brilliance lies is in taking such an apparently stiff framework and bending it into a work of warmth and beauty; or showing us that mathematics is not a cold, hard, science, but an elegant, complex, shimmering art. This feat of literary spoon-bending is accomplished with such calm elegance that it quite takes the breath away

The novel gallops forward, full of danger, delight and surprise. Nearly miraculous, it seems, is Pullman's ability to sketch character, place and motive in just a few lines

A long, taxing, complex journey, laced with beauty, terror and philosophy

As ever, Pullman's story is complex and vast but home to some of the finest storytelling in the 21st century. Revel in whole new worlds and enjoy one of literature's most wonderful heroines before she comes to HBO and the BBC

Pullman is confronting readers with the horrors of our own world reflected back at us. In The Secret Commonwealth he creates a fearful symmetry

Pullman has created a fantasy world, made yet more satisfying in this new volume. This is a book for getting older with

REVIEWS FOR LA BELLE SAUVAGE: THE BOOK OF DUST VOLUME ONE:

Fans of His Dark Materials will find themselves joyfully immersed in a familiar world . . . meanwhile, awaiting first-time readers is all the pleasure of commencing their own journey into this most captivating of universes at the very beginning of Lyra's story

No one else writes like Pullman . . . entirely worth the 17-year wait

A rich, imaginative, vividly characterised rite-of-passage tale

High-octane adventure accompanies ingenious plotting