Books by Terry Pratchett (+ quotes)

On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There's an avaricious but inept wizard, a naive tourist whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course THE EDGE of the planet...

It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.

It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.

As it moves towards a seemingly inevitable collision with a malevolent red star, the Discworld has only one possible saviour. Unfortunately, this happens to be the singularly inept and cowardly wizard called Rincewind, who was last seen falling off the edge of the world ....

There is only really one way to describe the effect the smell of Ankh-Morpork has on the visiting
nose, and that is by analogy.
Take a tartan. Sprinkle it with confetti. Light it with strobe lights.
Now take a chameleon.
Put the chameleon on the tartan.
Watch it closely.
See?

Radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.
It was a rather disappointing purple colour.

The last thing the wizard Drum Billet did, before Death laid a bony hand on his shoulder, was to pass on his staff of power to the eighth son of an eighth son. Unfortunately for his colleagues in the chauvinistic (not to say mysogynistic) world of magic, he failed to check on the new-born baby's sex...

It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of history.

Then you must train her, it said.
Train? What do I know from training wizards!
Then send her to university.
She's female! hooted Granny, bouncing up and down on her branch.
Well? Who says women can't be wizards?
Granny hesitated. The tree might as well have asked why fish couldn't be birds. She drew a deep breath, and started to speak. And stopped. She knew a cutting, incisive, withering and above all a self-evident answer existed. It was just that, to her extreme annoyance, she couldn't quite bring it to mind.

Death comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job.

After being assured that being dead was not compulsory, Mort accepted. However, he soon found that romantic longings did not mix easily with the responsibilities of being Death's apprentice ....

Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass. A library is just a genteel black hole that can read.

I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I WAS THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD.
"Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?"

There was an eighth son of an eighth son. He was, quite naturally, a wizard. And there it should have ended. However (for reasons we'd better not go into), he had seven sons. And then he had an eighth son ... a wizard squared ... a source of magic ... a Sourcerer.

'And what would humans be without love?'
RARE, said Death.

Sourcerer, n. (mythical) A proto-wizard, a doorway through which new majik may enter the world, a wizard not limited by the physical capabilities of hys own bodie, not by Destinie, nor by Deathe. It is written that there once were sourcerers in the youth of the world but not may there by now and blessed be, for sourcery would mean the Ende of the World . . . If the Creator hadd meant menne to be bee as goddes, he would have given them wings.

Meet Granny Weatherwax, the most highly regarded non-leader a coven of non-social witches could ever have.Generally, these loners don't get involved in anything, mush less royal intrigue. but then there are those times they can't help it. As Granny Weatherwax is about to discover, though, it's a lot harder to stir up trouble in the castle than some theatrical types would have you think. Even when you've got a few unexpected spells up your sleeve.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way round.

On nights such as these the gods, as has already been pointed out, play games other than chess with the fates of mortals and the thrones of kings. It is important to remember that they always cheat, right up to the end...

It's bad enough being new on the job, but Teppic hasn't a clue as to what a pharaoh is supposed to do. After all, he's been trained at Ankh-Morpork's famed assassins' school, across the sea from the Kingdom of the Sun. First, there's the monumental task of building a suitable resting place for Dad -- a pyramid to end all pyramids.Then there are the myriad administrative duties, such as dealing with mad priests, sacred crocodiles, and marching mummies. And to top it all off, the adolescent pharaoh discovers deceit, betrayal -- not to mention a headstrong handmaiden -- at the heart of his realm.

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.

Pyramids are dams in the stream of time. Correctly shaped and orientated, with the proper paracosmic measurements correctly plumbed in, the temporal potential of the great mass of stone can be diverted to accelerate or reverse time over a very small area, in the same way that a hydraulic ram can be induced to pump water against the flow. [...] By the way, contrary to popular opinion pyramids don't sharpen razor blades. They just take them back to when they weren't blunt. It's probably because of quantum.

This is where the dragons went.

They lie ... not dead, not asleep, but ... dormant. And although the space they occupy isn't like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly. And presumably, somewhere, there's a key ...

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to.

This book is dedicated to those fine men.

It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.

Eric is the Discworld's only demonology hacker. Pity he's not very good at it.

All he wants is three wishes granted. Nothing fancy - to be immortal, rule the world, have the most beautiful woman in the world fall madly in love with him, the usual stuff. But instead of a tractable demon, he calls up Rincewind, probably the most incompetent wizard in the universe, and the extremely intractable and hostile form of travel accessory known as the Luggage.

With them on his side, Eric's in for a ride through space and time that is bound to make him wish (quite fervently) again - this time that he'd never been born.

Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many ways they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters.

This follows studies by cosmotherapists which have revealed that the violence of the Big Bang can give a universe serious psychological problems when it gets older.

The alchemists of the Discworld have discovered the magic of the silver screen. But what is the dark secret of Holy Wood hill?

It's up to Victor Tugelbend ("Can't sing. Can't dance. Can handle a sword a little") and Theda Withel ("I come from a little town you've probably never heard of") to find out ...

Moving Pictures, the ninth Discworld novel, is a gloriously funny saga set against the background of a world gone mad!

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

Death is missing - presumed ... er ... gone. Which leads to the kind of chaos to always expect when an important public service is withdrawn.

Ghosts and poltergeists fill up the Discworld. Dead Rights activist Reg Shoe - "You Don't Have to Take This Lying Down" - suddenly has more work than he had ever dreamed of. And newly deceased wizard Windle Poons wakes up in his coffin to find that he has come back as a corpse. But it's up to Windle and the members of Ankh-Morpork's rather unfrightening group of undead to save the world for the living.

Meanwhile, on a little farm far, far away, a tall, dark stranger is turning out to be really good with a scythe. There's a harvest to be got in. And a different battle to be fought.

All other clocks, even the handless clock of Death, were reflections of the Clock. Exactly reflections of the Clock; they told the universe what the time was, but the Clock told Time what time is. It was the mainspring from which all time poured.
And the design d the Clock was this: that the biggest hand only went around once.
The second hand whirred along a circular path that even light would take days to travel, forever chased by the minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries and ages.
But the Universe hand went around once.
At least, until someone wound up the clockwork.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN ?

It seemed an easy job ...

After all, how difficult could it be to make sure that a servant girl doesn't marry a prince?

But for the witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, travelling to the distant city of Genua, things are never that simple ...

For one thing, all they've got is Mrs Gogol's voodoo, a one-eyed cat and a second-hand magic wand that can only do pumpkins. And they're up against the malignant power of the Godmother herself, who has made Destiny an offer it can't refuse. And finally there's the sheer power of the Story. Servant girls have to marry the Prince. That's what life is all about.

You can't fight a Happy Ending.

At least - up until now ...

A mirror can suck up a piece of soul. A mirror can contain the reflection of the whole Universe, a whole skyful of stars in a piece of silvered glass no thicker than a breath.
Know about mirrors and you nearly know everything.

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.

Brutha is the Chosen One.

His god has spoken to him, admittedly while currently in the shape of a tortoise.

Brutha is a simple lad. He can't read. He can't write. He's pretty good at growing melons. And his wants are few.

He wants to overthrow a huge and corrupt church.

He wants to prevent a horrible holy war.

He wants to stop the persecution of a philosopher who has dared to suggest that, contrary to the Church's dogma, the Discworld really does go through space on the back of an enormous turtle (*).

He wants peace and justice and brotherly love. He wants the Inquisition to stop torturing him now, please.

But most of all, what he really wants, more than anything else, is for his god to Choose Someone Else ...

(* which is true, but when has that ever mattered?)

Time is like a drug. Too much of it kills you.

Winners never talk about glorious victories. That's because they're the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterward. It's only the losers who have glorious victories.

Because what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods.

It's a hot Midsummer Night. The crop circles are turning up everywhere -- even on the mustard-and-cress of Pewsey Ogg, aged four. And Magrat Garlick, witch, is going to be married in the morning... Everything ought to be going like a dream.

But the Lancre All-Comers Morris Team have got drunk on a fairy mound and the elves have come back, bringing all those things traditionally associated with the magical, glittering realm of Faerie: cruelty, kidnapping, malice and evil, evil murder. Granny Weatherwax and her tiny argumentative coven have really got their work cut out this time...

With full supporting cast of dwarfs, wizards, trolls, Morris Dancers and one orang-utan. And lots of hey-nonny-nonny and blood all over the place.

The shortest unit of 'time' in the multiverse is the New York second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail.

"Be a MAN in the City Watch! The City watch needs MEN!"

But what it's -got- includes Corporal Carrot (technically a dwarf), Lance-constable Cuddy (really a dwarf), Lance-constable Detritus (a troll), Lance-constable Angua (a woman ... most of the time) and Corporal Nobbs (disqualified from the human race for shoving).

And they need all the help they can get. Because there's evil in the air and murder afoot and something very nasty in the streets.

It'd help ifit could all be sorted out by noon, because that's when Captain Vimes is officially retiring, handing in his badge and getting married.

And since this is Ankh-Morpork, noon promises to be not just high, but stinking.

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you are going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.
They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

Other children got given xylophones. Susan just had to ask her grandfather to take his vest off.

Yes. There's a Death in the family.

It's hard to grown up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe - especially when you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy.

And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered the Discworld.

It's Lawless. It changes people.

It's called Music with Rocks In.

It's got a beat and you can dance to it, but ...

It's alive.

And it won't fade away.

It made you want to kick down walls and ascend the sky on steps of fire. It made you want to pull all the switches and throw all the levers and stick your fingers in the electric socket of the Universe to see what happened next. It made you want to paint your bedroom wall black and cover it with posters.

Somewhere, in some other world far away from the Discworld, someone tentatively picked up a musical instrument that echoed to the rhythm in their soul.
It will never die.
It's here to stay.

Mighty Battles! Revolution! Death! War! (and his sons Terror and Panic, and daughter Clancy).

The oldest and most inscrutable empire on the Discworld is in turmoil, brought about by the revolutionary treatise What I Did On My Holidays. Workers are uniting, with nothing to lose but their water buffaloes. Warlords are struggling for power. War (and Clancy) are spreading through the ancient cities.

And all that stands in the way of terrible doom for eveyone is:

Rincewind the Wizard, who can't even spell the word 'wizard' ...

Cohen the barbarian hero, five foot tall in his surgical sandals, who has had a lifetime's experience of not dying ...

...and a very special butterfly.

There is a curse.

They say:
May you live in interesting times.

Gods can take any form, but the one aspect of themselves they cannot change is their eyes, which show their nature. The eyes of Fate are hardly eyes at all — just dark holes into an infinity speckled with what may be stars or, there again, may be other things.

The Opera House, Ankh Morpork ... a huge, rambling building, where masked figures and hooded shadows do wicked deeds in the wings ... where dying the death on stage is a little bit more than just a metaphor ... where innocent young sopranos are lured to their destiny by an evil mastermind in a hideously deformed evening dress ...

Where ... there's a couple of old ladies in pointy hats eating peanuts in the stalls and looking at the big chandelier and saying things like: 'There's an accident waiting to happen if ever I saw one'.

Yes ... Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, the Discworld's greatest witches, are back for an innocent night at the opera.

So there's going to be trouble (but nevertheless a good evening's entertainment with murders you can really hum)

The kicking and punching stopped only when it became apparent that all the mob was attacking was itself. And, since the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters, it was never very clear to anyone what had happened.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

Discworld Howdunnit

Who's murdering harmless old men? Who's poisoning the Patrician?

As autumn fogs hold Ankh-Morpork in their grip, the City Watch have to track down a murderer who can't be seen.

Maybe the golems know something - but the solemn man of clay, who work all day and night and are never any trouble to anyone, have started to commit suicide...

It's not as if the Watch hasn't got problems of its own. There's a werewolf suffering from Pre-Lunar Tension. Corporal Nobbs is hobnobbing with the nobs, and there's something really strange about the new dwarf recruit, especially his earings and eyeshadow.

Who can you trust when there are mobs on the streets and plotters in the dark and all the clues point the wrong way?

In the gloom of the night, Watch Commander Sir Samuel Vimes finds that the truth might not be out there at all.

It may be in amongst the words in the head

A chilling tale of poison and pottery.

I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE.

There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.

It's the night before Hogswatch. And it's too quiet.

There's snow, there're robins, there're trees covered with decorations, but there's a notable lack of the big fat man who delivers the toys ...

Susan the governess has got to find him before morning, otherwise the sun won't rise. and unfortunetly her only helpers are a raven with an eyeball fixation, the Death of Rats and an oh god of hangovers.

Worse still, someone is coming down the chimney. This time he's carrying a sack instead of a scythe, but there's something regrettably familiar ...

HO. HO. HO.

It's true what they say.

'You'd better watch out ...'

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

While evidence says that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they're probably all on first steps.

Discworld goes to war...

A weathercock has risen from the sea of Discworld. Suddenly you can tell which way the wind is blowing. A new land has surfaced, and so have old feuds. And as two armies march, Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morkpork City Watch has got just a few hours to deal with a crime so big that there's no law against it. It's called "war."

He's facing unpleasant foes who are out to get him... and that's just the people on *his* side. The enemy might be worse. And his pocket Dis-organiser says he's got "Die" under "Things To Do Today". But he'd better not, because the world's cleverest inventor and its most devious politician are on their way to the battlefield with a little package that's guaranteed to stop a battle...

Discworld goes to war, with armies of sardines, warriors, fishermen, squid, and at least one very camp follower.

Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already.

This is the Discworld's last continent, a completely separate creation.

It's hot. It's dry... very dry. There was this thing called once called The Wet, which no one now believes in. Practically everything that's not poisonous is venomous. But it's the best bloody place in the world, all right?

And it'll die in a few days. except...

Who is this hero striding across the red desert? Champion sheep shearer, horse rider, road warrior, beer drinker, bush ranger and someone who'll even eat a Meat Pie Floater when he's sober? A man in a hat, whose Luggage follows him on little legs, who's about to change history by preventing a swagman stealing a jumbuck by a billabong?

Yes... all this place has between itself and wind-blown doom is Rincewind, the inept wizard who can't even spell wizard. He's the only hero left.

Still... no worries, eh?

PEOPLE'S WHOLE LIVES DO PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE PROCESS IS CALLED 'LIVING'.

Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon -- he'd run them all.

Mightily Oats has not picked a good time to be a priest. He thought he'd come to the mountain kingdom of Lancre for a simple little religious ceremony. Now he's caught up in a war between vampires and witches, and he's not sure there _is_ a right side.

There're the witches - young Agnes, who is _really_ in two minds about everything, Magrat, who is trying to combine witchcraft and nappies, Nanny Ogg, who is far too knowing... and Granny Weatherwax, who is big trouble.

And the vampires are _intelligent_ - not easily got rid of with a garlic enema or by going to the window, grasping the curtains and saying, "I don't know about you, but isn't it a bit stuffy in here?"

They've got style and fancy waistcoats. They're out of the casket and want a bite of the future.

Mightily Oats knows he has a prayer, but wishes he had an axe.

They thought that you could see life through books but you couldn't, the reason being that the words got in the way.

The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.

A Discworld novel of dwarfs, diplomacy, intrigue and big lumps of fat.

Sam Vimes is a man on the run. Yesterday he was a duke, a chief of police and the ambassador to the mysterious, fat-rich country of Uberwald. Now he has nothing but his native wit and the gloomy trousers of Uncle Vanya (don't ask). It's snowing. It's freezing. And if he can't make it through the forest to civilization there's going to be a terrible war. But there are monsters on his trail. They're bright. They're fast. They're werewolves - and they're catching up. Sam Vimes is out of time, out of luck and already out of breath...

It was funny how people were people everywhere you went, even if the people concerned weren't the people the people who made up the phrase 'people are people everywhere' had traditionally thought of as people. And even if you weren't virtuous, as you had been brought up to understand the term, you did like to see virtue in other people, provided it didn't cost you anything.

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere of the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains.

William de Worde is the accidental editor of the Discworld's first newspaper. Now he must cope with the traditional perils of a journalists's life -- people who want him dead, a recovering vampire with a suicidal fascination for flash photography, some more people who want him dead in a different way and, worst of all, the man who keeps begging him to publish pictures of his humorously shaped potatoes.

William just wants to get at THE TRUTH. Unfortunately, everyone else wants to get at William. And it's only the third edition...

The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise.

Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.

Time is a resource. Everyone knows it has to be managed.

And on Discworld that is the job of the Monks of History, who store it and pump it from the places where it's wasted (like underwater -- how much time does a codfish need?) to places like cities, where there's never enough time.

But the construction of the world's first truly accurate clock starts a race against, well, time for Lu Tze and his apprentice Lobsang Ludd. Because it will stop time. And that will only be the start of everyone's problems.

Thief of Time comes complete with a full supporting cast of heroes and villains, yetis, martial artists and Ronnie, the fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse (who left before they became famous).

When you look into the abyss, it's not supposed to wave back.

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH", the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

He's been a legend in his own lifetime.

He can remember the great days of high adventure.

He can remember when a hero didn't have to worry about fences and lawyers and civilisation.

He can remember when people didn't tell you off for killing dragons.

But he can't always remember, these days, where he put his teeth...

He's really not happy about that bit.

So now, with his ancient sword and his new walking stick and his old friends -- and they're very old friends -- Cohen the Barbarian is going on one final quest. It's been a good life. He's going to climb the highest mountain in the Discworld and meet his gods. He doesn't like the way they let men grow old and die.

It's time, in fact, to give something back.

The last hero in the world is going to return what the first hero stole. With a vengeance. That'll mean the end of the world, if no one stops him in time.

Someone is going to try. So who knows who the last hero really is?

Too many people, when listing all the perils to be found in the search for lost treasure or ancient wisdom, had forgotten to put at the top of the list 'the man who arrived just before you'.

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

Imagine a million clever rats.
Rats that don't run.
Rats that fight...

Maurice, a streetwise tomcat, has the perfect money-making scam. He's found a stupid-looking kid who plays a pipe, and he has his very own plague of rats -- rats who are strangely educated, so Maurice can no longer think of them as 'lunch'. And everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers...

But when they reach the stricken town of Bad Blintz, the little con suddenly goes down the drain. For someone there is playing a different tune. A dark, shadowy tune. Something very, very bad is waiting in the cellars.

The educated rats must learn a new word.

EVIL.

It's not a game any more. It's a rat-eat-rat world down there. And that might only be the start...

A good plan isn't one where someone wins, it's where nobody thinks they've lost.

The important thing about adventures, thought Mr Bunnsy, was that they shouldn't be so long as to make you miss mealtimes.

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch had it all. But now he's back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck.

Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. But he must survive, because he has a job to do. He must track down a murderer, teach his younger self how to be a good copper and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion. There's a problem: if he wins, he's got no wife, no child, no future.

A Discworld Tale of One City, with a chorus full of street urchins, ladies of negotiable affection, rebels, secret policemen and other children of the revolution.

Truth! Justice! Freedom!
And a Hard-boiled Egg!

Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.

There's trouble on the Aching farm -- a monster in the river, a headless horseman in the driveway and nightmares spreading down from the hills. And now Tiffany Aching's little brother has been stolen by the Queen of the Fairies (although Tiffany doesn't think this is entirely a bad thing).

Tiffany's got to get him back. To help her, she ha a weapon (a frying pan), her granny's magic book (well, "Diseases of the Sheep", actually) and --

'Crivens! Whut aboot us ye daftie!'

-- oh yes. She's also got the Nac Mac Feegle, the Wee Free Men, the fightin', thievin', tiny blue-skinned pictsies who were thrown out of Fairyland for being Drunk and Disorderly...

A wise, witty and wonderfully inventive adventure set on the Discworld.

This time it had been been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

It was a sudden strange fancy...

Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearng trousers was easy. Learning to fart and belch in public and walk like an ape took more time...

And now she's enlisted in the army, and searching for her lost brother. But there's a war on. There's always a war on. And Polly and her fellow recruits are suddenly in the thick of it, without any training, and the enemy is hunting them.

All they have on their side is the most artful sergeant in the army and a vampire with a lust for coffee. Well... they have the Secret. And as they take the war to the heart of the enemy, they have to use all the resources of... the Monstrous Regiment.

The pen might not be mightier than the sword, but maybe the printing press was heavier than the siege weapon. Just a few words can change everything...

A real witch can ride a broomstick, cast spells and make a proper shamble out of nothing.

Eleven-year-old Tiffany Aching can't.

A real witch never casually steps out of her body, leaving it empty.

Tiffany does.
And there's something just waiting for a handy body to take over. Something ancient and horrible, which can't die.

Now she's got to fight back and learn to be a real witch really quickly, with the help of arch-witch Mistress Weatherwax and the truly amazing Miss Level...

-- "Crivens! And us!"

Oh, yes. And the Nac Mac Feegle -- the rowdiest, toughest, smelliest bunch of fairies ever to be thrown out of Fairyland for being drunk at two in the afternoon. They'll fight anything.

And even they might not be enough...

She snatched off the hat with stars on it. It wasn’t a bad hat, for show, although the stars made it look like a toy. But it was never her hat. It couldn’t be. The only hat worth wearing was the one you made for yourself, not one you bought, not one you were given. Your own hat, for your own head. Your own future, not someone else’s.

You have this thing you call... boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song — it went "Twinkle twinkle little star...." What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!

Convicted con-man and forger Moist van Lipwig is given a choice. Face the hangman's noose, or get Ankh-Morpork's ancient post office up and running efficiently! It was a tough decision...

Now, the former criminal is facing really big problems. There's tons of undelivered mail. Ghosts are talking to him. One of the postmen is 18,000 years old. And you really wouldn't want to know what his new girlfriend can do with a shoe.

To top it off, shadowy characters don't want the mail moved. Instead, they want him dead -- deader than all those dead letters. (And here he'd thought that all he'd have to face was rain, snow, and gloom of night...)"

I commend my soul to any god that can find it.

The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail.

Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

Koom Valley? That was where the trolls ambushed the dwarves, or the dwarves ambushed the trolls. It was far away. It was a long time ago.

But if he doesn't solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see the battle fought again, right outside his office.

With his beloved Watch crumbling around him and war-drums sounding, he must unravel every clue, outwit every assassin and brave any darkness to find the solution. And darkness is following him.

Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks round, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves.

At 9, Tiffany Aching defeated the cruel Queen of Fairyland.

At 11, she battled an ancient body-stealing evil.

At 13, Tiffany faces a new challenge: a boy. And boys can be a bit of a problem when you're thirteen. . . .

But the Wintersmith isn't exactly a boy. He is Winter itself—snow, gales, icicles—all of it. When he has a crush on Tiffany, he may make her roses out of ice, but his nature is blizzards and avalanches. And he wants Tiffany to stay in his gleaming, frozen world. Forever.

Tiffany will need all her cunning to make it to Spring. She'll also need her friends, from junior witches to the legendary Granny Weatherwax. They—

Crivens! Tiffany will need the Wee Free Men too! She'll have the help of the bravest, toughest, smelliest pictsies ever to be banished from Fairyland—whether she wants it or not.

It's going to be a cold, cold season, because if Tiffany doesn't survive until Spring—

—Spring won't come.

Witches usually wear black, but as far as she could tell the only reason that witches wore black was because they'd always worn black. This did not seem a good enough reason, so she tended to wear blue or green.

The Ankh-Morpork Post Office is running like . . . well, not at all like a government office. The mail is delivered promptly; meetings start and end on time; five out of six letters relegated to the Blind Letter Office ultimately wend their way to the correct addresses. Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig, former arch-swindler and confidence man, has exceeded all expectations—including his own. So it's somewhat disconcerting when Lord Vetinari summons Moist to the palace and asks, "Tell me, Mr. Lipwig, would you like to make some real money?"
Vetinari isn't talking about wages, of course. He's referring, rather, to the Royal Mint of Ankh-Morpork, a venerable institution that haas run for centuries on the hereditary employment of the Men of the Sheds and their loyal outworkers, who do make money in their spare time. Unfortunately, it costs more than a penny to make a penny, so the whole process seems somewhat counterintuitive.
Next door, at the Royal Bank, the Glooper, an "analogy machine," has scientifically established that one never has quite as much money at the end of the week as one thinks one should, and the bank's chairman, one elderly Topsy (née Turvy) Lavish, keeps two loaded crossbows at her desk. Oh, and the chief clerk is probably a vampire.
But before Moist has time to fully consider Vetinari's question, fate answers it for him. Now he's not only making money, but enemies too; he's got to spring a prisoner from jail, break into his own bank vault, stop the new manager from licking his face, and, above all, find out where all the gold has gone — otherwise, his life in banking, while very exciting, is going to be really, really short. . . .

"Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture."

The wizards at Ankh-Morpork's Unseen University are renowned for many things—wisdom, magic, and their love of teatime—but athletics is most assuredly not on the list. And so when Lord Ventinari, the city's benevolent tyrant, strongly suggests to Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully that the university revive an erstwhile tradition and once again put forth a football team composed of faculty, students, and staff, the wizards of UU find themselves in a quandary. To begin with, they have to figure out just what it is that makes this sport—soccer with a bit of rugby thrown in—so popular with Ankh-Morporkians of all ages and social strata. Then they have to learn how to play it. Oh, and on top of that, they must win a football match without using magic.
Meanwhile, Trev (a handsome street urchin and a right good kicker) falls hard for kitchen maid Juliet (beautiful, dim, and perhaps the greatest fashion model there ever was), and Juliet's best pal, UU night cook Glenda (homely, sensible, and a baker of jolly good pies) befriends the mysterious Mr. Nutt (about whom no one knows very much, including Mr. Nutt, which is worrisome . . .). As the big match approaches, these four lives are entangled and changed forever. Because the thing about football—the most important thing about football —is that it is never just about football.

Technically, the city of Ankh-Morpork is a Tyranny, which is not always the same thing as a monarchy, and in fact even the post of Tyrant has been somewhat redefined by the incumbent, Lord Vetinari, as the only form of democracy that works. Everyone is entitled to vote, unless disqualified by reason of age or not being Lord Vetinari.

"Peace?" said Vetinari. "Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war."

It starts with whispers.

Then someone picks up a stone.

Finally, the fires begin.

When people turn on witches, the innocents suffer. . .

Tiffany Aching has spent years studying with senior witches, and now she is on her own. As the witch of the Chalk, she performs the bits of witchcraft that aren't sparkly, aren't fun, don't involve any kind of wand, and that people seldom ever hear about: She does the unglamorous work of caring for the needy.

But someone or something is igniting fear, inculcating dark thoughts and angry murmurs against witches. Aided by her tiny blue allies, the Wee Free Men, Tiffany must find the source of this unrest and defeat the evil at its root before it takes her life. Because if Tiffany falls, the whole Chalk falls with her.

Chilling drama combines with laugh-out-loud humor and searing insight as beloved and bestselling author Terry Pratchett tells the high-stakes story of a young witch who stands in the gap between good and evil.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.

According to the writer of the best-selling crime novel ever to have been published in the city of Ankh-Morpork, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse.

And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder.

He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, there must be a chase and there must be a punishment.

They say that in the end all sins are forgiven.

But not quite all...

The worst thing you can do is nothing

If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.

To the consternation of the patrician, Lord Vetinari, a new invention has arrived in Ankh-Morpork - a great clanging monster of a machine that harnesses the power of all the elements: earth, air, fire and water. This being Ankh-Morpork, it's soon drawing astonished crowds, some of whom caught the zeitgeist early and arrive armed with notepads and very sensible rainwear.

Moist von Lipwig is not a man who enjoys hard work - as master of the Post Office, the Mint and the Royal Bank his input is, of course, vital... but largely dependent on words, which are fortunately not very heavy and don't always need greasing. However, he does enjoy being alive, which makes a new job offer from Vetinari hard to refuse...

Steam is rising over Discworld, driven by Mister Simnel, the man wi' t'flat cap and sliding rule who has an interesting arrangement with the sine and cosine. Moist will have to grapple with gallons of grease, goblins, a fat controller with a history of throwing employees down the stairs and some very angry dwarfs if he's going to stop it all going off the rails...

Bandits and governments 'ave so much in common that they might be interchangeable anywhere in the world...

Deep in the Chalk, something is stirring. The owls and the foxes can sense it, and Tiffany Aching feels it in her boots. An old enemy is gathering strength.

This is a time of endings and beginnings, old friends and new, a blurring of edges and a shifting of power. Now Tiffany stands between the light and the dark, the good and the bad.

As the fairy horde prepares for invasion, Tiffany must summon all the witches to stand with her. To protect the land. Her land.

There will be a reckoning…

For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.

Being a witch is a man’s job: that’s why it needs women to do it.

For the newcomer and the old hand alike the Discworld can be a fatally confusing planet. From the great city of Ankh-Morpork, featuring a river you could skateboard across if it wasn't so knobbly, to the distant Ramptop Mountains and the mysterious Counterweight Continent, the Discworld is a place where Death waits around every corner...

For safety's sake, you need a guide.

And here it is. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, respectively chronicler and cartographer of the Discworld, have produced the one and only definitive guide to the flat planet -- its geography, its flora and fauna, its (many) religions, its architecture and customs, and its outstanding personalities.

What is a Quantum Weather Butterfly? What does Death keep on his desk? Would you drink Bearhugger's Homeopathic Sipping Whiskey? How are the kings of Ankh-Morpork different from the kings of Ankh?

Everything the Discworld traveller needs to know is contained in these pages, together with useful maps and illustrations of significant places and emblems in this unique world.

They said it couldn't be done. Well it has been done, proving them wrong once again. After many years of research, cunningly contrived in as many minutes, the Discworld has its map. It takes full account of the historic and much documented expeditions of the Discworld's fêted (or at least fated) explorers: General Sir Roderick Purdeigh, Lars Larsnephew, Llamedos Jones, Lady Alice Venturi, Ponce da Quirm and of course Venter Borass.

Now travelers on this circular world can see it all: from Klatch to the Ramtops, from Cori Celesti to the Circle Sea, from Genua to Bhangbhangduc. The great cities of Hunghung, Pseudopolis, Al Khali and of course, Ankh-Morpork are placed with loving care upon this world which is carried through space by great A'Tuin.

Nanny Ogg, one of Discworld's most famous witches, here passes on some of her huge collection of tasty and interesting recipes. In addition to such dishes as Nobby's Mum's Distressed Pudding, Mrs. Ogg imparts her thoughts on such matters as life, death, and courtship.

In the fantasy universe of the phenomenally best-selling Discworld series, everything runs on magic and common sense. The world is flat and million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten. Our world seems different - it runs on rules, often rather strange ones. Science is our way of finding out what those rules are. The appeal of Discworld is that it mostly makes sense, in a way that particle physics doesn't.

"The Science of Discworld" uses the magic of Discworld to illuminate the scientific rules that govern "our" world. When a wizardly experiment goes adrift, the wizards of Unseen University find themselves with a pocket universe on their hands: Roundworld, where neither magic nor common sense seems to stand a chance against logic.

Roundworld is, of course, our own universe. With us inside it (eventually). Guided (if that's the word) by the wizards, we follow the story from the primal singularity of the Big Bang to the Internet and beyond. We discover how puny and insignificant lives are against a cosmic backdrop of creation and disaster. Yet, paradoxically, we see how the richness of a universe based on rules has led to a complex world and at least one species that tried to get a grip on what was going on...

The planet Earth has picked up a parasitic life form -- elves. They get everywhere. And they like humans to be superstitious, fearful and frightened of thunder. They're after our future and must be stopped... but by whom?

Enter the wizards of the Unseen University who, in the best-selling "The Science of Discworld", unwittingly created Earth and our own universe. At the time they quite failed to notice humanity. (Well, we've only been around for a million years, so we're easily overlooked...) But now, at last, they've found us.

In "The Science of Discworld II" science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen join forces again with fantasy author Terry Pratchett to see just what happens as the wizards battle against the elves. The Renaissance, for example, is given a push. London is replaced by a dozy Neanderthal village. The role of fat women in art is developed. And one very famous playwright gets born and writes The Play.

"The Globe" is a unique book, weaving together a fast-paced Discworld novelette with cutting edge scientific commentary on the evolution and development of the human mind, culture, language, art, and science. The result -- as the wizards grapple with the nature of Good and Evil, and history is rewritten several times over -- is a fascinating and brilliantly original view of the world we live in.

Roundworld is in trouble again, and this time it looks fatal. Having created it in the first place, the wizards of Unseen University feel vaguely responsible for its safety. They know the creatures who lived there escaped the impending Big Freeze by inventing the space elevator - they even intervened to rid the planet of a plague of elves, who attempted to divert humanity onto a different time track.

But now it's all gone wrong - Victorian England has stagnated and the pace of progress would embarrass a limping snail. Unless something drastic is done, there won't be time for anyone to invent spaceflight and the human race will be turned into ice-pops. Why, though, did history come adrift? Was it Sir Arthur Nightingale's dismal book about natural selection? Or was it the devastating response by an obscure country vicar called Charles Darwin, whose bestselling Theology of Species made it impossible to refute the divine design of living creatures? Either way, it's no easy task to change history, as the wizards discover to their cost. Can the God of Evolution come to humanity's aid and ensure Darwin writes a very different book? And who stopped him writing it in the first place?

Dom Salabos had a lot of advantages.

As heir to a huge fortune, he had an excellent robot servant (with Man-Friday subcircuity), a planet (the First Syrian Bank) as a godfather, a security chief who even ran checks on himself, and on Dom's home world even death was not always fatal.

Why then, in an age when prediction was a science, was his future in doubt?