Terry Pratchett

Con man Moist von Lipwig is offered a choice: the gallows or running Ankh-Morpork's collapsed Post Office. He chooses the Post Office, finds it haunted by the ghosts of undelivered letters, and faces the ruthless monopoly of the Clacks communications network. A reformed fraudster versus corporate villainy — Pratchett at his most satirically urgent.

Death takes on an apprentice: Mort, a gangly, earnest boy who proves to be terrible at the job in the worst possible way. When Mort uses his new scythe to save a princess who was scheduled to die, reality begins to fracture. Death, meanwhile, discovers he has always wanted to try being human.

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is thrown back in time to the days of his youth, forced to take the place of his old mentor and train his younger self during one of the city's defining revolutionary moments.

The eighth Discworld novel and first in the City Watch sub-series: a secret brotherhood summons a dragon to seize power in Ankh-Morpork, and the only thing standing between the city and a new dragon king is the most incompetent police force in fantasy history.

The Hogfather — Discworld's version of Father Christmas — has gone missing, and someone has hired the Assassins' Guild to make sure he stays that way. Death must put on the red suit and fill in, delivering presents on a flying sleigh, while his granddaughter Susan investigates the conspiracy behind the disappearance of belief itself.

The Ankh-Morpork City Watch is being diversified — trolls, dwarfs, a werewolf — and someone has stolen the Gonne, the Disc's first and only firearm. Sam Vimes is about to retire to marry Lady Sybil. Corporal Carrot, possibly the rightful heir to the throne, begins to understand what kind of man he wants to be.

Death is fired by the Auditors of Reality and given a finite lifespan. Taking the name Bill Door, he becomes a farmhand and experiences for the first time what it means to be mortal. Meanwhile, in Ankh-Morpork, the life-force that would have been collected by Death has nowhere to go — and the city starts filling up with something very strange.

A great god is reduced to living in the body of a small tortoise because no one truly believes in him anymore — only one novice monk does — and together they must reckon with what faith really means in a world dominated by the institution built in his name.

Three Discworld witches — the formidable Granny Weatherwax, the cheerfully bawdy Nanny Ogg, and the romantically-inclined Magrat Garlick — find themselves entangled in a political murder. A king has been killed, the heir spirited away, and the witches are drawn into a plot that echoes Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear simultaneously.

Someone is slowly poisoning the Patrician, and golems are being found smashed in the streets. Sam Vimes investigates both crimes simultaneously while navigating the city's aristocratic politics. At the centre of it all is the question of what a golem is — and whether a creature built to serve can want freedom.

The elves are returning to Lancre — and Pratchett's elves are nothing like Tolkien's. They are beautiful, pitiless, and feed on human misery. Granny Weatherwax faces the most powerful adversary of her career while Magrat Garlick prepares to marry King Verence. The novel that restored elves to their original folkloric terror.

Polly Perks disguises herself as a boy to join the army and find her missing brother. Her regiment — the last hope of a small nation losing a war — is full of soldiers who seem to be hiding their own secrets. Pratchett's most overtly political Discworld novel takes on war, religion, patriotism, and gender with characteristic wit.

Commander Sam Vimes is sent to Uberwald as Ankh-Morpork's Ambassador during the Low King of the Dwarfs' coronation, a politically fraught moment involving ancient tensions between dwarfs, vampires, and werewolves. Carrie takes charge of the Watch. Vimes navigates foreign politics with his characteristic bluntness — and then has to run for his life.

A clockmaker is commissioned to build a perfect clock that would stop time, bringing the Auditors of Reality one step closer to a universe without the messy unpredictability of life. The History Monks dispatch Lu-Tze, a sweeper with a formidable past, and his new apprentice Lobsang Ludd to prevent it. Death's granddaughter Susan is also involved.

Rincewind is magically transported to the Counterweight Continent — an analogue of imperial China — where revolution is stirring and the Great Wizzard (i.e., him) has been prophesied. Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde of octogenarian warriors are planning to steal the entire empire. Survival is, as always, Rincewind's primary career goal.

William de Worde accidentally invents the newspaper in Ankh-Morpork when a chance encounter with dwarfish printers gives him the idea of distributing his letter of city news more widely. Within days he has a press, a staff, and enemies. Someone is trying to frame the Patrician Vetinari, and the Ankh-Morpork Times is the only institution positioned to find out the truth.

The first Discworld novel follows the hapless failed wizard Rincewind and the naive tourist Twoflower across a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant star turtle — a comic masterpiece that parodies epic fantasy.