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Simon Russell Beale reads the second volume of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed The Book of Dust trilogy. A specially commissioned abridged reading for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4's Book at Bedtime.

It is twenty years since the events of La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey.

It is 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, in The Secret Commonwealth, we meet Lyra Silvertongue. And she is no longer a child...

The second volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty 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.

Reader ….. Simon Russell Beale
Writer ….. Philip Pullman
Abridger ….. Doreen Estall
Producer ….. Michael Shannon