Recommendations
Books Like His Dark Materials
A girl and her dæmon, a boy with a knife that cuts between worlds, and the war at the end of all of them
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials begins in alternate Oxford where every human's soul walks beside them in animal form, and a girl named Lyra discovers that her world's authorities have been doing something terrible to children. By the time the trilogy ends, Lyra and Will Parry have traveled through multiple worlds, spoken to angels, and faced a question about consciousness and freedom that Pullman has been building toward for three thousand pages. The series begins as children's adventure and ends as one of the most philosophically ambitious works of speculative fiction written in the last century. If the dæmons, the multiple-worlds premise, the anti-authoritarian theology, and the heartbreak of the ending gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
The Chronicles of Narnia
by C.S. Lewis
The great conversation partner to His Dark Materials — Pullman wrote HDM partly in response to Narnia's theology, and the two series are best understood together. Lewis uses fantasy to argue for faith; Pullman uses fantasy to argue for the authority of lived experience and human consciousness. Both are unmissable.
- 2Buy
The Subtle Knife
by Philip Pullman
If you read only The Golden Compass, the rest of the trilogy is essential: The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass are where Pullman's full ambitions become clear, and the ending of The Amber Spyglass is one of the most devastating in modern fiction.
- 3Buy
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
A boy who will become the most famous figure of his age, telling his own story from the end of it — Rothfuss and Pullman both write fantasy that takes ideas seriously, both build worlds with the care of systematic thinkers, and both put language itself at the center of the magic.
- 4Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Magic returning to England, and a conflict between an institution that controls it and the forces that refuse to be controlled — Clarke has Pullman's same sense that the magical world is ancient and indifferent to human categories, and the same formal beauty in the prose.
- 5Buy
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
The direct predecessor to His Dark Materials in the tradition of children's fantasy that takes metaphysical questions seriously — three children travel through space and time to save a father and find themselves confronting what evil actually is. L'Engle is the author Pullman most clearly descends from.
- 6Buy
The Starless Sea
by Erin Morgenstern
A man falls through a door beneath a library into a world that exists outside ordinary time, full of stories inside stories — Morgenstern has Pullman's same sense of hidden worlds that are more real than the surface world, and the same obsession with what stories do to the people who carry them.
- 7Buy
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
A man who lives in a house that is a labyrinth, who has forgotten that other worlds exist — Clarke's most recent novel has Pullman's same sense of a person inside a larger system who doesn't fully understand the rules of the world they inhabit, and the same quiet revelation when those rules are finally exposed.
- 8Buy
Stardust
by Neil Gaiman
A fairy tale in which the wall between the ordinary world and the magical one is literal — a wall between a village and Faerie that only a few people can cross. Gaiman and Pullman both write fantasy that takes the conventions of fairy tales and asks what they would actually mean if they were true.
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