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story identification - Fantasy book series about people who are accompanied about animals representing their "soul"


It's a series of fantasy books in which the inhabitants of the world, from the time when they're children, get to somehow have an accompanying small animal that represents their soul or their personality.



Answer



This is the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. Each character has an individual "Dæmon" that supposedly represents a sort of spirit animal.


Per wikipedia:




A dæmon is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech — regardless of the form they take — and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons and their humans are almost always of different genders.



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