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.
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.