His Dark Materials

“This is one of my favourite books. Lyra feels like a natural successor to Matilda. She is a character of action. She isn’t sitting in a corner reading. She is out there and she is having a real effect on her story. She isn’t being buffeted by forces and having to rebel against them, she is out there actively seeking an adventure. I read this when I was eleven and starting secondary school. I remember her really sticking with me not least because she lies so much.” Read more...

Fierce Girls in Tween Fiction

Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Children's Author

“Other children’s books often have children behaving in terrible ways. Philip himself has acknowledged that his His Dark Materials is, to some extent, a response to the Chronicles of Narnia which has children behaving in all sorts of slavish ways, obeying authority because it is authority, and setting all sorts of poor moral examples.The children in Philip’s books are thoughtful, intelligent, and morally concerned. They are motivated by love and loyalty. And they are very complex. He doesn’t shy away from the moral complexity, the difficulties of choice, the lesser of two evils. That is also something that comes up in his books. There is no perfect solution, you struggle to truth.” Read more...

The best books on Humanism

Andrew Copson, Nonprofit Leaders & Activist

Philip Pullman himself is the narrator of the audiobook of the trilogy His Dark Materials. Different actors play the parts of the characters, in what is known in the trade as a ‘multi-voiced performance.’

Narrator: Philip Pullman, full cast

Length: 10 hours and 45 minutes

Great Audiobooks Narrated by Their Authors

The audiobook of the His Dark Materials trilogy has Philip Pullman himself as the narrator, with actors saying the words of the characters.

Narrator: Philip Pullman, full cast

Length: 10 hours and 45 minutes

Recommended listening age 9 upwards

Best Audiobooks for Kids

One of the most surprising aspects of the Harry Potter phenomenon was seeing adults reading kids’ books. There’s something very relaxing about reading books aimed at a younger age group, but not all series written for kids have enough depth or humour to pull it off. Three series that stand out for us in terms of books like Harry Potter that adults like reading too are:

Firstly, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, in particular the first book, Northern Lights. This is an amazing reading experience that will stay with you. The heroine is Lyra Belaqua, who lives in a college in Oxford and is being brought up by its scholars. Saying more would ruin it, but it’s a fantasy experience with a touch of the theological, though written by an atheist (Pullman is a supporter of Humanists UK). If you’re an adult looking for a kids’ book to read, Northern Lights is absolutely unmissable.

“One of the most surprising aspects of the Harry Potter phenomenon was seeing adults reading kids’ books”

Also unmissable is The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. If you tried The Hobbit, it feels a little two-dimensional to read as an adult but in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s fantasy world completely comes alive. It’s a world with its own history (lots of it, perhaps too much for some kids, unless they like history), with poetry, with its own languages. There’s adventure and extreme danger, mixed in with the good-natured common sense of the hobbits and particularly the hobbit hero, Frodo Baggins. The mysterious power of the ring gives the book an allure which more straightforward quest/journey stories lack and the evil beings that try to stop Frodo are, quite frankly, terrifying.

One last series of books to mention here: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. This is a modern, urban, teenage take on Harry Potter, with everything that implies. The writing is beautiful. In one scene, the main characters turn into geese, and the description of that feeling of flying will come back to you every time you see geese flying across the sky.

From our article Books like Harry Potter