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Philip Pullman announces conclusion to The Book of Dust trilogy
Philip Pullman’s highly anticipated final volume of The Book of Dust trilogy, The Rose Field (Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books), is set to be released later this year.
The book will be published in hardback, trade paperback, e-book and audio simultaneously by David Fickling Books in association with Penguin Random House (PRH) in the UK, and by Random House in the US, on 23rd October 2025. It will be illustrated by Chris Wormell, and Michael Sheen will return to narrate the audiobook.
Marking 30 years since the world was first introduced to Pullman’s heroine Lyra Belacqua in Northern Lights (Scholastic), The Rose Field is the culmination of the cultural phenomenon of his two series, The Book of Dust and His Dark Materials.
"When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth, she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city," the synopsis says. "Pantalaimon had run from her – part of himself – in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost. Lyra travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her dæmon. And Malcolm, loyal Malcolm, too journeyed far from home, towards the Silk Roads in search of Lyra..."
The blurb continues: "In The Rose Field, their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways. They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new, learning all the while the depth and surprising truths of the alethiometer. All around them, the world is aflame – made terrifying by fear, power and greed.
"As they move East, towards the red building that will reunite them and give them answers – on Dust, on the special roses, on imagination – so too does the Magisterium, at war against all that Lyra holds dear."
Pullman said: "I think of The Rose Field 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.
"Over a long and dangerous journey searching for her dæmon Pan, and with him her lost imagination, Lyra comes to discover a new understanding of the world: that this change affects everything, from the way roads are built to the relationship people have with their deepest selves.
"It may be other things too, but I hope 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, fairy tales, ballads and myths."
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Francesca Dow, managing director, Penguin Random House Children’s (UK), added: "In the six years since The Secret Commonwealth was published, we know that hundreds of thousands of readers have been desperate to return – for the final time – to Lyra and her world. That wait will soon be over and from the first pages of The Rose Field, those readers will find that this world, and Lyra herself, is changing. This is storytelling at its most brilliant, set against a vast, extraordinary canvas, an intricate and most magical story about what it is to be human. It is also a gripping quest that surprises and delights at every twist and turn, a true page-turner."
David Fickling, publisher and editor at David Fickling Books, commented: "‛What do you want to write next?’ I asked Philip Pullman over a bangers-and-mash editorial lunch in 1995. ‛Well,’ he said, ‛I was thinking of setting a novel in the universe of John Milton, author of Paradise Lost...’ 3,000 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. Pullman is a poet of story."
Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones, said: "The arrival of the concluding volume of The Book of Dust is a highly momentous occasion for booksellers, bookshops and readers everywhere: the highlight of our bookselling year and a moment which has been longed for since the release of The Secret Commonwealth six years ago. One would be hard pressed to dream up a publication which could be met with such anticipation."
