Philip Pullman 'relieved' to finish Lyra's final book

Author Philip Pullman has revealed details of the sixth and final book in his series about Lyra Silvertongue, the character at the heart of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust trilogies.

The Rose Field will be published on 23 October, and will follow his heroine's story up to her early 20s.

She was 11 when she was introduced in the best-selling and award-winning first His Dark Materials book, Northern Lights, in 1995.

Pullman, 78, said he was "relieved" to have "come out of the end alive and able to see it being made into a book and published".

The Rose Field refers to a magnetic or gravitational field, and was mentioned in the opening chapters of Northern Lights, when scholars at Lyra's Oxford college secretly discussed a mysterious phenomenon called Dust.

"In this final book, Lyra is on the verge of discovering what Dust is and what it means, and the story is about how that happens," the author told BBC Radio 4's The World At One.

The story also deals with the nature of imagination, the former Oxford English teacher said. "I've got a view of what the imagination is, and Lyra discovers what she thinks the imagination is, so we're talking about that as well."

Beyond the world of Dust and daemons, this book has been influenced by real-life global events, including the rise of tech billionaires, Pullman revealed.

"It has become clear to me in the last 10 years that the influence of money and the power of the billionaire class, the power of the tech industry and all those extractive things like oil and gas and so on, have a much deeper effect on the world than I had thought," he said.

"And in thinking about that, and seeing the way the story's gone, and seeing what Lyra has to face and endure and decide about, I've thought about it more deeply myself.

"The world has changed enormously. We're either at the end of a long period of American power, which will end, presumably, like the end of any empire, in chaos, destructiveness, and then the gradual coming together of nations in a new form. That'll be interesting to watch, if I'm still alive to watch it.

"But we're also at a time when we can look back, with the resources of the internet and so on... We're at an age where we've got the wisdom of centuries and millennia to draw on. It'll be interesting to see if we do or we don't. I suspect that most of us won't, but some of us might."

The Rose Field comes six years after the publication of the previous book in The Book of Dust series.

The trilogy's first two books have sold 49 million copies around the world, publisher Midas said.

Pullman said he would now turn his attention to planning a memoir, which would be titled Before I Forget.

"I've been talking for quite a while about writing a memoir before I forget everything, and that's something that's possibly on the horizon," he said.

"I was born in 1946 I was brought up as a child of the British Empire, which still existed then. And I've seen a very great number of changes, as everyone of my age has.

"There's nothing remarkable about that, but I've seen a lot of things that I loved, enjoyed, made me happy, made me excited in various ways. And I'd like to remember those and write them down, because I think it's a shame if they're not celebrated and remembered."