You Finished His Dark Materials.
What Now?

The companion trilogy to His Dark Materials — La Belle Sauvage (before HDM), The Secret Commonwealth (after), and a third book — follows Lyra at different ages and Malcolm Polstead throughout.

Read these immediately after His Dark Materials. La Belle Sauvage shows Lyra as a baby; The Secret Commonwealth follows her as a young adult. Essential reading for anyone who loved the original trilogy.

Once Upon a Time in the North and Lyra's Oxford are two short companion volumes that expand the world.

Short but worth reading — Once Upon a Time in the North is Lee Scoresby's origin story. Lyra's Oxford is set after The Amber Spyglass and connects to The Secret Commonwealth.

A child military genius is trained at Battle School — isolated, tested, and shaped into a weapon against an alien threat. He doesn't know the full truth of what he's being prepared for.

The same core question as His Dark Materials: what does it cost to use a child as an instrument? Card and Pullman reach different conclusions, but the moral weight is comparable.

Four siblings step through a wardrobe into Narnia — a world of talking animals, witches, and a lion named Aslan who is very definitely not a tame lion.

His Dark Materials was written explicitly in conversation with Narnia — Pullman's critique of Lewis's theology is embedded throughout. Reading both deepens both. Start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Quentin Coldwater discovers that the magic school from his favourite childhood books is real — and that getting everything you wished for is not the same as being happy.

The adult response to everything His Dark Materials started: magic is real, it matters, and the people who have it are still broken and mortal. Grossman's trilogy is darker and more literary than it first appears.

Kvothe tells his own story from the beginning — the most brilliant student the Arcanum ever admitted, who is now hiding from his own legend.

The intellectual precocity of Lyra taken into epic fantasy. Kvothe's hunger to understand how magic works has the same quality as Lyra's relationship with the alethiometer — a gift that is also a burden.

Two magicians attempt to revive English magic during the Napoleonic Wars. One is cautious, one is brilliant, and the faerie world they're both ignoring is much more dangerous than either of them understands.

The same sense of a world where magic is real and has genuine consequences — moral, political, and personal. Clarke's novel is slower and more literary, but the depth of its world-building is comparable to Pullman's.