Night Watch
by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, 2002); audiobook read by Stephen Briggs (Isis, 2002)
Night Watch is one of Pratchett’s least funny Discworld novels, in the best possible way. The gallows humour remains but the story — a poignant time travel paradox that sees Sam Vimes mentor his younger self through a bloody revolution — is more focussed.
Hogfather
by Terry Pratchett (Gollancz, 1996); audiobook read by Nigel Planer (Isis, 1999)
Pratchett might belabour the point, yet his stark critique of Christmas is so lavishly adorned that the humour tends to dominate. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a black comedy, it is Death (no less) and his granddaughter who bring the magic back to Hogswatchnight.
I Shall Wear Midnight
by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, 2010); audiobook read by Stephen Briggs (Isis, 2010)
Though not among the funniest of the Discworld novels, I Shall Wear Midnight nevertheless upholds Pratchett’s near-ubiquitous drollery, rustling from within a serious treatise on intolerance and antagonism and other such weak points of human nature. Stephen Briggs proves a volant narrator.
Pyramids
by Terry Pratchett (Corgi, 1989); audiobook read by Nigel Planer (Isis, 2002)
Pratchett’s Discworld series truly hit its stride in this, the BSFA-winning seventh book. Pyramids is a self-contained and ingeniously conceived, desert-dry satire on the type of human thinking that underpins religious folly. Nigel Planer is suitably droll in voicing the befuddled participants.
Good Omens
by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
radio dramatisation by Dirk Maggs (BBC Worldwide, 2014)
Dirk Maggs has adapted Pratchett and Gaiman’s comedic novel of the apocalypse with apposite exuberance, yet for all the well-pitched sound design and the cast’s astute voice work, this zany and enjoyable dramatisation does perforce forego the original book’s drollery of prose.
Only You Can Save Mankind
by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, 1992)
The aliens in Johnny’s computer game are real, in eye-opening contrast to his dissociated home life and the Gulf War’s televised entertainment. The concept entices but the execution feels hurried. Moreover, Pratchett’s twelve-year-olds remain in now incongruous accord with the early 1990s.
Guards! Guards!
by Terry Pratchett; read by Nigel Planer (Isis, 1995)
[first published by Gollancz, 1989]
Some of the dialogue feels slightly laboured when read aloud (a small misgiving), but in the grand scale of all things magical and satirical this is the perfect introduction to Pratchett’s Discworld series. Planer handles with aplomb both narrative comedy and characterisation.
The Shepherd’s Crown
by Terry Pratchett (Harper, 2015)
Apposite to Terry Pratchett’s passing, his final novel sees the death of Granny Weatherwax (one of the first-introduced Discworld characters) and the befalling of her legacy to young witch Tiffany Aching (one who most embodies the series’ growth): a gentle, bittersweet finale.