An adventure through a parallel world, incorporating magic, Arctic exploration, and talking animal visualisations of the soul; The Northern Lights is far more than the perfect children’s story. It stole my heart in a way few other books have managed to the extent that now, 20 years after my first reading of it, the His Dark Materials trilogy still has the ability to set my imagination alight, make the hairs on my arms stand on end, and steels my resolve to be brave and adventurous and stubborn in all I do.

The finest discovery for me among the pages of this book, was Lyra. A naughty, heroic, self-centred, dirty-kneed, deceptive, wild haired young girl, outsmarting the grown-ups time and time again and dreaming of escapades in the ice-covered North. As a dress-hating, daydreaming seven year old with the sort of introverted imagination that could keep me occupied alone with a patch of garden and a hoard of Sylvanian Families for days on end, a deep obsession with Lyra’s wiles and adventures was inevitable.

Lyra is an orphan, half-raised by the distracted academics of an Oxford college and half by the cities’ servants, boat-dwelling Gyptians, and streets. In a world that is like ours in many ways, but with subtle differences, she spends her days evading lessons and bath times, and exploring the vaults, roofs and many rooms of her college home, or running the streets with her friend Roger. When the eminent researcher and explorer Lord Asriel comes to visit, Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon spy on the meeting, and what they discover in that room throws them head first into an adventure more exciting, dangerous and important that they could ever have imagined.

For me, stuck in the mid 90’s with a boy’s haircut and a hunger for new books, where the contents of the ‘Young Adult Fiction’ section of my local library were enough to make you want to roll over and die, The Northern Lights and the following two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy caught me by the collar and made me pay delighted attention. Finally, a fantastic adventure with a girl just like me, and an author who didn’t feel the giants of religion, love, war, betrayal and death were too much for children to take on. Oh, and did I mention the trepanned skulls, the violent race of giant armoured polar bears, and the child-stealing Gobblers?