How long does it take to read Northern Lights?
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman takes about 7 hours 31 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 1 of His Dark Materials
Next: The Subtle Knife
About 7 hours 31 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1995. 410 pages, about 112,750 words. Written for children.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 32 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 31 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 42 minutes |
The page count is the median across 148 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In a landmark epic of fantasy and storytelling, Philip Pullman invites readers into a world as convincing and thoroughly realized as Narnia, Earthsea, or Redwall. Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors. First, her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North, including photographs of a mysterious celestial phenomenon called Dust and the dim outline of a city suspended in the Aurora Borealis that he suspects is part of an alternate universe. He leaves Lyra in the care of Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her. In this multilayered narrative, however, nothing is as it seems. Lyra sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger, bearing a rare truth-telling instrument, the compass of the title. All around her children are disappearing—victims of so-called "Gobblers"—and being used as subjects in terrible experiments that separate humans from their daemons, creatures that reflect each person's inner being. And somehow, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved.
Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
- violence
- death of a child
- animal death
- abuse
Subjects: Political theology, Polar bears, Kidnapping, Adventure stories, Children and adults, Juvenile fiction
