Recommendations from our site
“Yes. Night Watch is also one of the Guards books—that’s his series of police procedurals which began with Guards! Guards! in 1989. There was a purple patch of Terry’s writing, from 2001 onwards, before Alzheimer’s began to take the edge off his writing, sadly. There was a period, though, where he was completely unstoppable: masterpiece after masterpiece after masterpiece. And that really started with Night Watch.” Read more...
The Best Terry Pratchett Books
Marc Burrows, Biographer
“This book is Pratchett at his best, for me. It’s a really solid thriller. What he does with the Vimes character is that he makes a policeman: just any copper. He’s a copper who thinks like a copper. He doesn’t trust clues. And because it’s the Discworld, he’s a copper who knows his frame of reference: he knows about Raymond Chandler, he knows about Poirot. He’s the type of character who’s constantly winking at the genre that he’s also a part of. Somehow, despite all that winking, he’s an actual brilliant character, who solves the mystery by being dogged, in the same way that Marlowe does, but has Sherlock Holmes-like abilities of deduction. He can also sit down and ponder things through like Poirot. So he’s got elements of all the best detectives. But then, it’s a fantasy. It’s also a time travel book. And Pratchett does all these things brilliantly. He gives you everything you’d want from a time travel book – like, he goes back in time and intersects with a younger version of himself, who he has to train up to be the man he’s going to become.” Read more...
Stuart Turton, Novelist
