Philip Pullman announces The Rose Field

One of the best works of fantasy literature in recent decades is Philip Pullman's superb trilogy His Dark Materials. Made up of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, they're an epic story that follows a young girl named Lyra Belacqua, who lives in an alternate Oxford that's ruled by a powerful religious order known as the Magisterium.

In the first novel, one of her friends, Roger, is kidnapped, and when Lyra heads off to find out what happened to him, she finds that the Magisterium has been conducting some horrifying experiments around a particle it calls Dust. Dust is an elementary particle that leads to consciousness, but is believed by the organization to be the cause of sin. Aided by a truth-telling device called an alethiometer, Lyra sets off for the arctic and aided by witches, armored polar bears, and explorers, discovers that the plot spans entire worlds, and over the next couple of books, ended up travelling all over the place.

If you haven't read the novels, I'm probably underselling them a bit, but I found them to be electrifying reads with incredible depth and thought behind them (at a time when Harry Potter reigned supreme in bookstores, these far out-class them.) The first book was adapted as a film in 2007 (it's fine, but doesn't live up to the books), while HBO adapted the entire trilogy as His Dark Materials between 2019 and 2022.

After the trilogy came to an end, Pullman noted in 2005 that he had begun working on another book set in the same world, The Book of Dust. The story ended up taking a lot longer to tell, and it wasn't until 2017 that he announced that the story would come out – not as a single book, but as a new trilogy, with the first, La Belle Sauvage (set prior to the events of The Golden Compass), hitting stores that fall. The next, The Secret Commonwealth, was published in 2019.

Now, Pullman has announced that the final installment is coming this fall – 20 years after first announcing the the story, and 30 years after he began the entire series. This book will be titled The Rose Fields, and it's due out on October 23rd.

Here's the book's description from Waterstone's:

When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. 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.
When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. 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.
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.

I was a bit lukewarm on the first book and the second when I read them – I don't know that they really lived up to what he came up with in those first three books, but I've often wondered if the story as a whole will click into place when you can see the entire thing. I'm looking forward to finding out when this new, final installment hits this fall.