Thief Of Time: (Discworld Novel 26) (Discworld Novels) - Softcover

Terry Pratchett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552167649 ISBN 13: 9780552167642

Publisher: Corgi, 2013

Synopsis

'This is the best Pratchett I've read' Sunday Telegraph

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 . . .

Time is a resource. Everyone knows it has to be managed. You mess with it at your peril. You can let it move fast or slowly but what you mustn't do is allow it to stop.

The Monks of History have the glamorous job of time management in the Discworld. They store it and pump it from the places where it's wasted (like the underwater - how much time does a codfish need?) to places like cities, where there's never enough time.

But with the construction of the world's first truly accurate clock starts a race against, well, time begins for History monk for Lu Tze and his suspiciously talented apprentice Lobsang Ludd.

Because a truly accurate clock will stop time.

And when time stands still, everything in human existence stops with it. Then, there really is no future.
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The Discworld novels can be read in any order but Thief of Time is the fifth book in the Death series.

About this title

Review:

In Thief of Time in the great stinking metropolis of Ankh Morpork, an obsessed clockmaker receives an unusual commission from an excessively beautiful woman whose feet do not touch the ground; strict school-teacher Susan finds herself summoned by her grandfather, Death, to do him a favour; the monks who manage the even distribution of Time find themselves with a recalcitrant novice; and dairyman Ronnie Soak muses on his glory days, when he was the Fifth Rider of the Apocalypse, the one who left before they got famous.

Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, confronts Discworld and a variety of its defenders with an insidious menace; never before has the phrase "The End of History" had quite so sinister a sound. As always, the sometimes startlingly surrealistically original, sometimes comfortingly groan-worthy, jokes are underlain by some intensely complex ideas and tight plotting. Susan makes a reappearance as one of Pratchett's more interesting heroines; the sinister Lady LeJean is one of Pratchett's most interesting villains, particularly once we learn the answer to the mystery about her.

There is an attractive darkness to much of the humour here--Pratchett is often at his best when at his darkest.--Roz Kaveney

Review:

"In a better world he would be acclaimed as a great writer rather than a merely successful one...This is the best Pratchett I've read...ought to be a strong contender for the Booker prize." -- Charles Spencer, Sunday Telegraph "Reads with all the polished fluency and sure-footed pacing that have become Pratchett's hallmarks over the years." -- Peter Ingham, Times on Saturday "Terry Pratchett is one of the great inventors of secondary -- or imaginative or alternative -- worlds. He is not derivative. He is too strong...He has the real energy of the primary storyteller." -- A.S. Byatt, The Times "The unique selling point of the Discworld novels is their irony, allied to lashings of broad pantomime humour." -- TES "Fans look to him for brilliantly funny dialogue, high peaks of imagination and a sense of participating in events which are strange, yet filled with everyday occurrences -- the real world in disguise." -- The Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Corgi
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0552167649
• ISBN 13: 9780552167642
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432