Northern Lights (published in the US as The Golden Compass) is the first novel in the His Dark Materials series, written by British novelist Philip Pullman, and published in 1995.
In real life, the resemblance of Lyra Belacqua's alethiometer to a large compass caused the US publishers of Northern Lights to retitle the book The Golden Compass. In fact The Golden Compasses was an early proposal for the name of the trilogy (instead of His Dark Materials), taken from Milton's Paradise Lost, where it refers to the drawing instrument, rather than a navigation instrument.
The story concerns a mission to recover a number of children that have been abducted by the General Oblation Board (or Gobblers), an arm of the Magisterium, and who are believed to be the object of experimentation to determine the nature and purpose of Dust. Lyra becomes involved after her friend Roger Parslow goes missing. She joins the mission to the North, where she inadvertantly penetrates the security at the Bolvangar experimental complex in Lapland.
On Radio
A radio drama version of this story was broadcast on RTE (Irish public radio) in 2003 and the entire trilogy was dramatised on BBC radio in the United Kingdom.