“Pratchett . . . has a satirist's instinct for the absurd and a cartoonist's eye for the telling detail." —Daily Telegraph (London)“The purely funniest English writer since Wodehouse.” —Washington Post Book WorldSam Vimes, watch commander of Ankh-Morpork, is at long last taking a much-needed (and well deserved) vacation. But, of course, this is Discworld®, where nothing goes as planned—and before Vimes can even change his cardboard-soled boots for vacationer's slippers, the gruff watch commander soon finds himself enmeshed in a fresh fiasco fraught with magic, cunning, daring, and (for the reader more than poor Vimes) endless hilarity. Did he really expect time off? As Vimes himself says in Feet of Clay, “there's some magical creature called 'overtime,' only no one's even seen its footprints.” Following the New York Times bestselling Unseen Academichals, Terry Pratchett delivers an enthralling new tale from a place of...

Tom Teal and Albert Barnes are government employees tasked with visiting a hard-to-reach house and convincing its inhabitant, a member of the Zarene family that controls the whole valley, that a large dam project is a good idea. But the Zarenes have their own way of doing things, and they don't take kindly to outsiders...At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Some night-time prowler is turning the citizens of Ankh-Morpork, greatest city of the fantasy Discworld * , into something resembling small charcoal biscuits. And that's a real problem for Captain Vimes of the City Watch, who must tramp the mean streets of the city searching for a seventy-foot-long fire-breathing dragon which, he believes, can help him with their enquiries. In a city thrown into turmoil by magic, charcoal biscuits, secret societies and mad lady dragon breeders ("Just tell him 'sit' if he'sothering you"), he's just looking for the facts. * Which is flat and rides through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the shell of an enormous turtle, as every scholar knows.

In the four decades since his first book appeared in print, Terry Pratchett has become one of the world's best-selling and best-loved authors. Here for the first time are his short stories and other short form fiction collected into one volume. A Blink of the Screen charts the course of Pratchett's long writing career: from his schooldays through to his first writing job on the Bucks Free Press,; to the origins of his debut novel, The Carpet People; and on again to the dizzy mastery of the phenomenally successful Discworld series. Here are characters both familiar and yet to be discovered; abandoned worlds and others still expanding; adventure, chickens, death, disco and, actually, some quite disturbing ideas about Christmas,all of it shot through with his inimitable brand of humour. With an introduction by Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt, illustrations by the late Josh Kirby and drawings by the author himself, this is a book to treasure.