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La Belle Sauvage,
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Paul
Technically no, but I'd recommend it. The book takes place before the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) and tells its own story with a different protagonist. But there are plenty of things in it that won't really be meaningful without the trilogy, from characters whose importance won't be clear to subplots that seem to go nowhere if you don't realize how they evolve into things in the previous books. You simply won't understand the world as well. I can't actually know how this reads by itself, since I've read the trilogy repeatedly, but my recommendation would definitely be to start with the trilogy and then come back to Book of Dust. It doesn't hurt that His Dark Materials are really phenomenal books.
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