Malcolm Polstead is the type of boy who observes everything but goes unnoticed himself. And so it was perhaps inevitable that he would become a spy...

Malcolm's father owns an inn called The Trout, on the banks of the River Thames, and all of Oxford passes through its doors. Malcolm and his daemon, Asta, secretly gather news and gossip, but during a relentlessly rainy winter, a secret message ends up in the boy's hands, speaking of a dangerous substance called Dust.

The spy to whom the message was addressed asks him to keep his eyes open, and he sees suspects everywhere: the explorer Lord Asriel, who is running from something, agents from the Magisterium, a Gypsy named Coram, and a beautiful woman with a devilish monkey for a daemon. They are all searching for the same thing: a little girl, still a baby, named Lyra.

Lyra is the type of girl who attracts others like a magnet. And Malcolm will face a host of dangers and make enormous sacrifices to keep her safe and unharmed amidst the chaos.

It has been twenty years since the events that took place in the first volume of the Book of Dust and marked the beginning of Lyra Belacqua's life-changing journey.

Seven years have passed since readers left Lyra and her beloved Will Parry on a bench in the Botanic Garden of Oxford, and now they meet again as Lyra Silvertongue, no longer a child... In the second volume of the Book of Dust, the now twenty-year-old Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon, are drawn into the complex and dangerous places of a world they had no idea existed. Malcolm also follows his own path. Once a boy with a boat and a mission to save a baby from a flood, he is now a man with a strong sense of duty and a desire to do what is right. Their world is both familiar and strange, and they must travel beyond Oxford, crossing Europe and Asia, in search of a city haunted by demons, a secret in the heart of a desert, and the mystery of Dust.