Lyra Silvertongue finds herself caught up in a conspiracy when her dæmon witnesses a murder.

Philip Pullman’s second volume of his acclaimed The Book of Dust trilogy.

Omnibus of the first five of ten parts abridged by Doreen Estall.

Read by Simon Russell Beale.

It's 20 years since the events of the first volume (La Belle Sauvage) unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey.

It's seven years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, bestselling His Dark Materials sequence.

Now we meet Lyra Silvertongue. And she is now 20 years old, and her dæmon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed.

They must travel far beyond the edges of Oxford, across Europe and into Asia, in search for what is lost – a city haunted by dæmons, a secret at the heart of a desert, and the mystery of the elusive Dust.

Producer: Michael Shannon

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2019. Show less