Discworld: Witches (abridged)

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 that happily and wilfully flies in the face of the facts. In this case, the birth of a baby girl, born a wizard, by mistake. Everybody knows that there's no such thing as a female wizard. But now it's gone and happened, there's nothing much anyone can do about it. Let the battle of the sexes begin.

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...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'No one mixes the fantastical and mundane to better comic effect or offers sharper insights into the absurdities of modern endeavour' Daily Mail The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants...

Reality is all very well in small doses. It's a perfectly conventional and convenient way of neutralising the imagination. But sometimes when there's more than one reality at play, imagination just won't be neutralised, and the walls between realities come tumbling down. Unfortunately there's usually a damned good reason for there being walls between them in the first place. To keep things out. Things who want to make mischief and play havoc with the natural order.

'I thought: opera, how hard can it be? Songs. Pretty girls dancing. Nice scenery. Lots of people handing over cash. Got to be better than the cut-throat world of yoghurt, I thought. Now everwhere I go there's...' Death, to be precise. And plenty of it. In unpleasant variations. This isn't real...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Terry Pratchett will remain an enduring, endearing presence in comic literature' Guardian The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is...