Terry Pratchett

I’ve been a Terry Pratchett fan since my teens, though I haven’t read the whole of the Discworld oeuvre, I am getting through them slowly on Audible. These three audiobooks are terrifically read by Colin Morgan, Indira Varma, and Jon Culshaw, with footnotes read by Bill Nighy and Peter Serafinowicz as the voice of death. They're really terrific productions.

Most of the Discworld books fall into a category based on the main group they follow. For these three we follow Rincewind, the Witches and the City Watch - three of Pratchett’s most-written ensembles, that seem to me to serve different functions for the 40-odd book series.

Rincewind firstly is usually used for Pratchett to explore a broader idea or culture. In Interesting Times, Rincewind is lost in the Agatean Empire, a fictional version of East Asia. Pratchett covers honour culture, fireworks and empire, all the while constructing a perfectly-toned ensemble including bumbling wizards, ageing barbarians and uptight imperial lords.

In Maskerade we follow the Witches on a Phantom of the Opera murder mystery. It’s the perfect setting for these books, and for fans of crime fiction like me. The witches aren’t normally my favourite protagonists, but I found a lot to love in this one.

Finally Feet of Clay - like all the Watch books - expands and deepens our reading relationship the Watch as an ensemble. There’s a mystery here too, but I think it shines when it’s exploring the relationships and adding to the already existing group that we’ve been through 4 or 5 books with.

Pratchett is spot on about so many things. In Interesting Times a wizard creates artificial intelligence. He finds himself thanking it for making the calculations, then feeling quite silly about it - the equivalent of feeling weird about saying thank you to Siri, and quite prescient in a book as old as I am.

If you haven’t read any Discworld books, there is no better place to start than the first one you can get your hands on. Since you asked, my favourites are Monstrous Regiment, Guards! Guards!, and Reaper Man.