The summer holidays are dragging on and Harry Potter can't wait for the start of the school year. It is his fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and there are spells to be learnt and (unluckily) Potions and Divination lessons to be attended. But Harry can't know that the atmosphere is darkening around him.

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at centre of its own bewildering world. A stranger has come, with an impossible demand, and something unthinkable is released. Soon the city is gripped by an alien terror. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground and a reckoning is due at the city's heart, in the vast edifice of Perdido Street Station.

'We're going to the land of the dead and we're going to come back' - Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest war that has ever been - and a journey to a dark place from which no-one has ever returned...

'Without this child, we shall all die'. Lyra Belacqua and her animal daemon live half-wild and carefree among scholars of Jordan College, Oxford. The destiny that awaits her will take her to the frozen lands of the Arctic, where witch-clans reign and ice-bears fight. Her journey will have immeasurable consequences far beyond her own world.

The Eyre Affair is a novel.

* The International Sensation * In the tradition of THE SECRET HISTORY and THE ALIENIST - a captivating and suspenseful novel that delves into the true history of Count Dracula ...