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Seventeen years after Philip Pullman killed God in the final volume of his trilogy of fantasy novels, “His Dark Materials,” the celebrated British atheist returns to the parallel world of Brytain and the dreaming spires of Oxford in “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage.”

It is a massive publishing event, with a first-run printing of half a million copies in the U.S. and a publicity campaign that crosses the globe. “Is it a prequel? Is it a sequel? It’s neither,” the author has remarked. “In fact, The Book of Dust is . . . an…