They say that diplomacy is a gentle art. That its finest practitioners are subtle, sophisticated individuals for whom nuance and subtext are meat and drink. And that mastering it is a lifetime's work. But you do need a certain inclination in that direction. It's not something you can just pick up on[...]
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 if he can't make it through the forest to civilization, there's going to be a terrible war. But there are werewolve[...]
The truth will out, or at least it's going to try to, any minute. New printing technology means that words just won't obediently stay nailed down like usual. They can now be taken apart and used to make other words. Which is downright dangerous. There's a very real threat of news getting out there. [...]
William de Worde is the accidental editor of the "Discworld's" first newspaper. Now he must cope with traditional perils of a journalist's life - people who want him dead, a recovering vampire with a suicidal fascination for flash photography, and, worst of all, the man who keeps begging him to publ[...]
Time isn't a toy to be played with. It's bigger than all of us. It exists outside the artificial and arbitrary divisions into which humankind has presumptuously shoehorned it. It needs to elastic. To understand truly, you have to see time as the most important resource we have. You mess with it at y[...]
Time is a resource. And on the Discworld that is the job of the Monks of History, who store it and pump it from the places where it's wasted to places like cities, where there's never enough time. But the construction of the world's first accurate clock starts a race against, well, time for Lu Tze a[...]
Susan had never hung up a stocking. She'd never put a tooth under her pillow in the serious expectation that a dentally inclined fairy would turn up. It wasn't that her parents didn't believe in such things. They didn't need to believe in them. They know they existed. They just wished they didn't.[...]
It's the night before Hogswatch. And it's too quiet. There's a notable lack of the big fat man who delivers the toys... He's gone. Susan, the governess has got to find him before morning, otherwise the sun won't rise. Worse still, someone is coming down the chimney. This time he's carrying a sack, b[...]
It began as a sudden strange fancy... Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry... and now she's enlisted in the army, and searching for her lost brother. But there's a war on. And Polly and her fellow recruits are in the thick of it, without any training, and the enemy is hunting them. They have [...]
The post was an old thing, of course, but it was so old that it had magically become new again. The post office is an ailing institution belonging to the olden days. New technology overshadows its mind-numbing bureaucracy and the creakingly slow pace of change. You can call them nostalgic, but there[...]
It's an offer you can't refuse. Who would not to wish to be the man in charge of Ankh-Morpork's Royal Mint and the bank next door? It's a job for life. But, as former con-man Moist von Lipwig is learning, the life is not necessarily for long. The Chief Cashier is almost certainly a vampire. There's [...]
Most of us grow up having always known 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 now beginning to be forgotten. Legends, myths, fairytales: our world is made up of the stories we told our[...]
A 300 year old wizard is after his girlfriend, he's about to be exposed as a fraud, but the Assassins Guild might get him first. In fact lot of people want him dead. Oh. And every day he has to take the Chairman for walkies. Everywhere he looks he's making enemies. What he should be doing is ...Maki[...]
When it comes to racial hatred and sectarian violence, the phrase 'vive la difference' is usually one of the furthest from the tip of the mob's tongue. When a whole city is poised on the very brink of anarchy, it only requires one thing to pitch it over the edge. Like the murder of one of the key pa[...]
'What shall we do?' said Twoflower. 'Panic?' said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival. When the very fabric of time and space are about to be put through the wringer - in this instance by the imminent arrival of a very large and determinedly oncoming meteori[...]
There're a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next . . . an' they need watchin' . . . 'There's trouble on the Wold, its boundaries weak since Granny Aching - the hag o' the hills - died.[...]
It's a rat-eat-rat world . . .Every town on Discworld knows the stories about rats and pipers, and Maurice - a streetwise tomcat with his very own plague of rats - has the perfect insider-dealing scam going. Until he runs across someone playing a different tune.[...]
I, me. Who am I? There are some things a real witch would never do. Like stepping out of her body, as trainee witch Tiffany Aching does, leaving it handily empty for something ancient and horrible to move in.[...]
Tiffany Aching put one foot wrong, made one little mistake ...And now the spirit of winter is in love with her. He gives her roses and icebergs, and showers her with snowflakes - which is tough when you're 13, but also just a little bit ...cool. And just because the Wintersmith wants to marry you is[...]
The banks are facing a crisis, and this time it's too serious even for the old boys' club to sort it out - this time, they've sunk to government intervention. But opening the vaults to public scrutiny brings a whole host of problems for those at the top.[...]
A collection of some of the wittiest, pithiest and wisest quotations.
'Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don't let you go around again until you get it right'. People have been predicting the end of the world almost from its very beginning, so it's only natural to be skeptical when a new date is set for Judgement Day. But what if, for once, the predictions [...]
When a giant wave destroys his entire Nation - his family and everyone he has ever known - Mau finds himself totally alone. Until he meets Daphne, daughter of a colonial Governor and the sole survivor from a shipwreck. They have no common language, no common culture - but together they discover some[...]
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[...]
1916: the Western Front. 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 has the mud, blood and blasted landscape of No Man's Land gone?[...]