In Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett continues the fantasy adventures on Discworld-where anything goes. Anything but murder, that is. Commander Vimes of the Watch must investigate a puzzling series of deaths, with help from various trolls and dwarfs. Pratchett's humour and excellent writing skills draw the reader effortlessly into his zany world. Feet of Clay is 19th in the series. -Blaise Selby.

Marvellous Discworld, which revolves on the backs of four great elephants and a big turtle, spins into Interesting Times, the 17th outing in Terry Pratchett's rollicking fantasy series. The gods are playing games again, and this time the mysterious Lady opposes Fate in a match of "Destinies of Nations Hanging by a Thread". -Blaise Selby.

The Colour of Magic is Terry Pratchett's maiden voyage through the bizarre land of Discworld. His entertaining and witty series has grown to more than 20 books, and this is where it all starts-with the tourist Twoflower and his hapless wizard guide, Rincewind ("All wizards get like that. it's the quicksilver fumes. Rots their brains. Mushrooms, too. "). Pratchett spoofs fantasy clichés-and everything else he can think of-while marshalling a profusion of characters through a madcap adventure. The Colour of Magic is followed by The Light Fantastic. [+]

The new Discworld novel Night Watch has the power and energy that characterizes Terry Pratchett at his occasional best, as well as the wild surreal humour he always gives us. Sam Vimes, running hero of the Guards sequence, finds himself cast back in time to the Ankh-Morpork of his youth-a much nastier city, with an actively deranged Patrician and a sadistic secret police-and finding himself filling in for Keel, the tough honest copper who teaches the young Vimes everything he knows. And, more worryingly, who dies heroically in the insurrection Vimes knows to be imminent. With a psychopath from his own time rising in the vile ranks of the Cable Street Unmentionables complicating things, Vimes has to ensure that history takes its course so that he will have the right future to go back to, and to keep his younger self alive-this is Pratchett's plotting at its most thoroughly constructed and wonderfully devious. Ankh-Morpork has for a long time been one of the most thoroughly imagined cities in fantasy-here Pratchett gives us a fascinating gloomy glimpse of its past and of the younger selves of some of his best-loved characters, and of the brief-lived People's Republic of Treacle-Mine Road. -Roz Kaveney.