Showing results by author "Terry Pratchett" in All Categories

Never let real life get in the way of a good story, especially when a good story involves three witches, including a fairy godmother, and travelling to a faraway land to make sure that a servant girl doesn't marry a prince. It looks as though a happy ending may be averted before catastrophe strikes. But unfortunately, the forces of good are up against a godmother who has made Destiny an offer it can't refuse.

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork. And now the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match without using magic...so they're in the mood for trying everything else. To do so, they recruit an unlikely group of players: Trev, a street urchin with a talent for kicking a tin can; Glenda, the night chef who makes a mean pie; Juliet, the kitchen hand turned world's greatest fashion model; and the mysterious Mr Nutt, who has something powerful, and dark, locked away inside him.

An aura of mean-minded resentfulness is thick in the streets of Ankh-Morpork. Insurrection is in the air. The Haves and Have-Nots are about to fall out all over again. The Have-Nots want some of their own magic. But magic in the hands of amateurs is a dangerous thing. The City Watch is the last line of defence against such unnatural goings-on. But when even the Watch have trouble telling right from wrong, you know that law and order ain't what they used to be. But that's all about to change.

Tiffany Aching leaps into a dance - and suddenly the spirit of winter is in love with her. He's showering her with snowflakes and offering her a crown of ice. Which is creepy, but also just a little bit...cool. Now she's dancing to his tune. She can't change the steps. But unless Tiffany can work out how to deal with the Wintersmith, there will never be another springtime.

The fourth book in the Science of Discworld series, and this time around dealing with the really big questions, Terry Pratchett’s brilliant new Discworld story Judgement Day is annotated with very big footnotes (the interleaving chapters) by mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen, to bring you a mind-mangling combination of fiction, cutting-edge science and philosophy.Marjorie Daw is a librarian, and takes her job – and indeed the truth of words – very seriously. She doesn’t know it, but her world and ours – Roundworld – is in big trouble.

Tiffany Aching is ready to begin her apprenticeship in magic, but life isn't exactly what she thought it would be. She expects spells and magic - not chores and ill-tempered goats! Surely there must be more to witchcraft than this? And Tiffany will find that she needs her magic more than ever, to fight off the insidious, disembodied creature that is pursuing her. This time, neither Mistress Weatherwax (the greatest witch in the world) nor the fierce, six-inch-high Wee Free Men can protect her. In the end, it will take all of Tiffany's inner strength to save herself.

The Globe goes beyond science to explore the development of the human mind. Terry Pratchett and his acclaimed co-authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen combine the tale of the wizards rewriting human history with discussions of the origins and evolution of culture, language, art, and science, offering a fascinating and brilliantly original view of the world we live in.

Eine zwielichtige Sekte mit dem Namen "Die aufgeklärten Brüder der völlig schwarzen Nacht" beschwört einen gewaltigen Drachen über Ankh Morpork herauf, der die Stadt in Schutt und Asche zu legen droht. Der Drache gerät außer Kontrolle, und nur die Stadtwache kann Ankh Morpork vor dem Untergang bewahren. Samuel Mumm und seine Männer haben alle Hände voll zu tun, bis von unvermuteter Seite Hilfe naht.

A nightmarish danger threatens from the other side of reality.... Armed with only a frying pan and her common sense, young witch-to-be Tiffany Aching must defend her home against the monsters of Fairyland. Luckily she has some very unusual help: the local Nac Mac Feegle - a.k.a. the Wee Free Men - a clan of fierce, sheep-stealing, sword-wielding, six-inch-high blue men. Together they must face headless horsemen, ferocious grimhounds, terrifying dreams come true and ultimately the sinister queen of the Elves herself....

A full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s celebrated apocalyptic comic novel, with bonus length episodes and outtakes. According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday in fact. Just after Any Answers on Radio 4….Events have been set in motion to bring about the End of Days. The armies of Good and Evil are gathering and making their way towards the sleepy English village of Lower Tadfield.

The Royal Bank is facing a crisis, and it's time for a change of management. There are a few problems that may arise with the job.... The Chief Cashier is almost certainly a vampire - there's something nameless in the cellar and it turns out that the Royal Mint runs at a loss. Meanwhile, people actually want to know where the money's gone. It's a job for life. But, as former con-man Moist von Lipwig is learning, that life is not necessarily a long one. He's about to be exposed as a fraud, but if he's lucky the Assassins' Guild might get him first.

In the beginning, there was nothing but endless flatness. Then came the Carpet.... That's the old story everyone knows and loves (even if they don't really believe it). But now the Carpet is home to many different tribes and peoples and there's a new story in the making. The story of Fray, sweeping a trail of destruction across the Carpet, and two brothers, who set out on an adventure to end all adventures.

It's 2070-71. Nearly six decades after Step Day, a new society continues to evolve in the Long Earth. Now, a message has been received: "Join us". The Next - the hyperintelligent posthumans - realize that the missive contains instructions for kick-starting the development of an immense artificial intelligence known as The Machine. But to build this computer the size of an Earth continent, they must obtain help from the more populous and still industrious worlds of mankind.

The Western Front, 1916. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of No Man's Land gone? Madison, Wisconsin, 2015. Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive - some said mad, others dangerous - scientist when she finds a curious gadget: a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a potato. It is the prototype of a life-changing invention....

A generation after the events of The Long Earth, humankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by "stepping". A new "America" - Valhalla - is emerging more than a million steps from Datum - our Earth. Thanks to a bountiful environment, the Valhallan society mirrors the core values and behaviors of colonial America. And Valhalla is growing restless under the controlling long arm of the Datum government.

Most of us grew up having always known when to touch wood or cross our fingers, and what happens when a princess kisses a frog or a boy pulls a sword from a stone, yet sadly some of these things are beginning to be forgotten. Legends, myths, and fairy tales: Our world is made up of the stories we told ourselves about where we came from and how we got here. It is the same on Discworld, except that beings, which on Earth are creatures of the imagination - like vampires, trolls, witches and, possibly, gods - are real, alive and, in some cases kicking, on the Disc.

To the thousands of tiny nomes who live under the floorboards of a large department store, there is no outside. Things like day and night, sun and rain are just daft old legends. Then a devastating piece of news shatters their existence: the Store, their whole world, is to be demolished.

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. There are some situations where the correct response is to display the sort of ignorance that happily and wilfully flies in the face of the facts. In this case, the birth of a baby girl, born a wizard, by mistake. Everybody knows that there's no such thing as a female wizard. But now it's gone and happened, there's nothing much anyone can do about it. Let the battle of the sexes begin.

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, and a chase....

Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place that might sound and smell very much like our own, but that looks completely different. It plays by different rules. Certainly it refuses to succumb to the quaint notion that universes are ruled by pure logic and the harmony of numbers. But just because the Disc is different doesn't mean that some things don't stay the same.