IF NOT YOU, WHO ELSE? As the mighty alien fleet from the latest computer game thunders across the screen, Johnny prepares to blow them into the usual million pieces. And they send him a message: We surrender. They're not supposed to do that! They're supposed to die. And computer joysticks don't have 'Don't Fire' buttons . . . But it's only a game, isn't it. Isn't it?

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork — not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go gloing when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they’re in the mood for trying everything else. The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too). As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever. Because the thing about football — the important thing about football — is that it is not just about football. Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

“Pratchett . . . has a satirist's instinct for the absurd and a cartoonist's eye for the telling detail." —Daily Telegraph (London)“The purely funniest English writer since Wodehouse.” —Washington Post Book WorldSam Vimes, watch commander of Ankh-Morpork, is at long last taking a much-needed (and well deserved) vacation. But, of course, this is Discworld®, where nothing goes as planned—and before Vimes can even change his cardboard-soled boots for vacationer's slippers, the gruff watch commander soon finds himself enmeshed in a fresh fiasco fraught with magic, cunning, daring, and (for the reader more than poor Vimes) endless hilarity. Did he really expect time off? As Vimes himself says in Feet of Clay, “there's some magical creature called 'overtime,' only no one's even seen its footprints.” Following the New York Times bestselling Unseen Academichals, Terry Pratchett delivers an enthralling new tale from a place of...

Some night-time prowler is turning the citizens of Ankh-Morpork, greatest city of the fantasy Discworld * , into something resembling small charcoal biscuits. And that's a real problem for Captain Vimes of the City Watch, who must tramp the mean streets of the city searching for a seventy-foot-long fire-breathing dragon which, he believes, can help him with their enquiries. In a city thrown into turmoil by magic, charcoal biscuits, secret societies and mad lady dragon breeders ("Just tell him 'sit' if he'sothering you"), he's just looking for the facts. * Which is flat and rides through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the shell of an enormous turtle, as every scholar knows.

In the four decades since his first book appeared in print, Terry Pratchett has become one of the world's best-selling and best-loved authors. Here for the first time are his short stories and other short form fiction collected into one volume. A Blink of the Screen charts the course of Pratchett's long writing career: from his schooldays through to his first writing job on the Bucks Free Press,; to the origins of his debut novel, The Carpet People; and on again to the dizzy mastery of the phenomenally successful Discworld series. Here are characters both familiar and yet to be discovered; abandoned worlds and others still expanding; adventure, chickens, death, disco and, actually, some quite disturbing ideas about Christmas,all of it shot through with his inimitable brand of humour. With an introduction by Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt, illustrations by the late Josh Kirby and drawings by the author himself, this is a book to treasure.

The eighth Discworld novel — After this, dragons will never be the same again!This is where the dragons went. They lie . . . not dead, not asleep, but . . . dormant. And although the space they occupy isn’t like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly. And presumably, somewhere, there’s a key . . .

From Snuff: 'Vimes' prompt arrival got a nod of approval from Sybil, who gingerly handed him a new book to read to Young Sam. Vimes looked at the cover. The title was The World of Poo. When his wife was out of eyeshot he carefully leafed through it. Well, okay, you had to accept that the world had moved on and these days fairy stories were probably not going to be about twinkly little things with wings. As he turned page after page, it dawned on him that whoever had written this book, they certainly knew what would make kids like Young Sam laugh until they were nearly sick. The bit about sailing down the river almost made him smile. But interspersed with the scatology was actually quite interesting stuff about septic tanks and dunnakin divers and gongfermors and how dog muck helped make the very best leather, and other things that you never thought you would need to know, but once heard somehow lodged in your mind.'