'But, Grinstead, this painting is seventy years old - probably nearer eighty! You're not being serious - I mean . . . What do you mean?'
On a dark winter's night in 1970, Horley and Grinstead huddle for warmth in the Senior Common Room of a college in Oxford. Conversation turns to the two impressive works of art that Horley has recently added to his collection.
What the two men don't know is that these pieces are connected in mysterious and improbable ways; and they are about to be caught in the cross-fire of a story which has travelled time and worlds.
Philip Pullman one of the most acclaimed writers working today.
He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek. He has also won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights (and the reader-voted ‘Carnegie of Carnegies’ for the best children’s book of the past seventy years); the Whitbread (now Costa) Award for The Amber Spyglass; and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in honour of his body of work. The first volume of Philip Pullman’s long-awaited trilogy The Book of Dust, set in the same world as His Dark Materials, published in 2017, and the second volume followed in 2019.