The BEST news so far in 2017 is BOOK RELATED!!!! Have you heard???

Love fairy tales and mythology?
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A Twist in the Tail Thursdays features all this and more!

Everyone's excitement about the following news was all over social media after the announcement, but if you managed to miss it, well, I'm too excited not to talk about it again, so get ready for the best news I've heard so far in 2017!!!

On Valentine's Day, the Publishing Industry proved it loved readers by giving them a present twelve year's in the making. His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman has finally finished writing THE BOOK OF DUST, and it's going to be a trilogy. The first, still untitled book releases simultaneously in the UK and US on October 19th, 2017.

The first book in the series, THE GOLDEN COMPASS,  was turned into the movie starring Nicole Kidman a decade ago, and the BBC is working on creating a TV series that will begin airing in either late 2017 or sometime in 2018.

Here are a few details from the Publishers Weekly press release:

 "Plot details are under wraps until publication, of course, but in a statement provided by his publishers, Pullman shared that the book is set 10 years before the events of THE GOLDEN COMPASS and centers on Lyra Belacqua, heroine of the His Dark Materials trilogy, a series that has sold more than 17.5 million copies in 40 languages since its debut in 1996. 

Pullman has also coined a new publishing term to describe the forthcoming work. It is neither a prequel nor a sequel nor a standalone. 'In fact, The Book of Dust is.... an equal,' Pullman wrote. 'It doesn’t stand before or after His Dark Materials, but beside it. It’s a different story, but there are settings that readers of His Dark Materials will recognize, and characters they’ve met before. Also, of course, there are some characters who are new to us, including an ordinary boy (a boy we have seen in an earlier part of Lyra’s story, if we were paying attention) who, with Lyra, is caught up in a terrifying adventure that takes him into a new world.'”

Growing up, His Dark Materials was one of my all-time favorite series, surpassed only by The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I read both series again and again. The books shattered and broke me, but also filled my heart and took me away on dangerous, captivating adventures.

My own tattered copies, still cherished and kept on a shelf of honor!!!

Poor tattered books!
(I'll likely have to re-buy these if they come out with a pretty new box set!!!)

When I recently heard that the BBC was going to produce the series for TV, I was extremely excited. They've created some compelling series and have great quality, and I trust them to do a great job. Every couple of months, I've been checking to see if there's been any major news on airdates, etc., because I'm so impatient to fall n love with this story all over again.

I've also been chomping at the bit for a re-read, and just can never work it into my reading schedule. Now, with The Book of Dust on the horizon, I have a really good excuse to dive back into this beloved series!