Tiffany Aching, the young witch from The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith is back in a new adventure featuring Discworld characters both familiar to fans (such as Tiffany, the Wee Free Men, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg) and new (meet Wee Mad Arthur, the Nac Mac Feegle on the City Watch whose only previous appearance was a brief c...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse.And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe....

They say that diplomacy is a gentle art. That mastering it is a lifetime's work. But you do need a certain inclination in that direction. It's not something you can just pick up on the job.   A few days ago Sam Vimes was a copper – an important copper, true – chief of police – but still, at his core, a policeman....

'Neighbours… hah. People'd live for ages side by side, nodding at one another amicably on their way to work, and then some trivial thing would happen and someone would be having a garden fork removed from their ear.'Throughout history, there's always been a perfectly good reason to start a war....

Mightily Oats has not picked a good time to be priest.He thought he'd come to the mountain kingdom of Lancre for a simple little religious ceremony. Now he's caught up in a war between vampires and witches, and he's not sure there is a right side....

'Things have to come to an end, see. That's how it works when you turn the world into stories. You should never have done that. You shouldn't treat people like they was characters, like they was things. But if you do, then you've got to know where the story ends....

'When you start believing in Spirits, you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are, you're believing in Gods. And then you're in trouble.'Reality is all very well in small doses. It's a perfectly conventional and convenient way of neutralising the imagination....

Things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folks; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle.Three witches gathered on a lonely heath. A king cruelly murdered, his throne usurped by his ambitious cousin. A child heir and the crown of the kingdom, both missing....

Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant idiot.Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. It plays by different rules....

'What shall we do?' said Twoflower.'Panic?' said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival.As it moves towards a seemingly inevitable collision with a malevolent red star, the Discworld could do with a hero....

All this books and stuff, that isn't what it should all be about. What we need is real wizardry.All is not well within the Unseen University. The endemic politics of the place have ensured that it has finally got what it wished for: the most powerful wizard on the disc. Which could mean that the death of all wizardry is at hand....

'Holy wood is a different sort of place. People act differently here. Everywhere else the most important things are gods or money or cattle. Here, the most important thing is to be important.'People might say that reality is a quality that things possess in the same way that they possess weight....

'Look after the dead', said the priests, 'and the dead will look after you.'Wise words in all probability, but a tall order when you have just become the pharaoh of a small and penniless country whose largesse – and indeed treasury – is unlikely to stretch to the building of a monumental pyramid to honour your dead father....

'The people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the oppressor I don't know who is.'An aura of mean-minded resentfulness is thick in the streets of Ankh-Morpork....

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.There are some situations where the correct response is to display the sort of ignorance which happily and wilfully flies in the face of the facts. In this case, the birth of a baby girl, born a wizard – by mistake....