Guards! Guards! (Discworld Series #8)

by Terry Pratchett, Ben Aaranovitch Narrated by Jon Culshaw, Peter Serafinowicz, Bill Nighy, Ben Aaronovitch

Overview

Brought to you by Penguin.

'It was the usual Ankh-Morpork mob in times of crisis; half of them were here to complain, a quarter of them were here to watch the other half, and the remainder were here to rob, importune or sell hotdogs to the rest.'

Insurrection is in the air in the city of Ankh-Morpork. The Haves and Have-Nots are about to fall out all over again.

Captain Sam Vimes of the city's ramshackle Night Watch is used to this. It's enough to drive a man to drink. Well, to drink more. But this time, something is different - the Have-Nots have found the key to a dormant, lethal weapon that even they don't fully understand, and they're about to unleash a campaign of terror on the city.

Time for Captain Vimes to sober up.

The Discworld novels can be read in any order but Guards! Guards! is the first book in the City Watch series.

'This is one of Pratchett's best books. Hilarious and highly recommended' The Times

© Terry Pratchett 1989 (P) Penguin Audio 2023

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Brilliant, and on everybody's reading list." — SFreviews.net

"At once brilliant and ludicrous, borrowing heavily from traditional mythology and fantasy writings, and then turns them on their heads, spins them around, flips them inside out and mirrors them onto the page. Nothing is the same when you step inside the world of Discworld, and you love Pratchett for it." — Fantasy Book Review (UK)

"There's no wrong place to start reading Pratchett. . . . The film-noir-with-dragons novel Guards! Guards!, the series starting point for sharp, dutiful City Watch head Commander Vimes, is [a] solid entryway." — NPR

"As traumatic as it is to only choose one Pratchett, this first entry in his Guards sub-series encompasses everything that is brilliant about his writing: terrific characterisation and plotting, a completely believable world, and new details that come up with each re-reading. Thirty years after it was published, the story of dwarves, dragons and good police work remains fresh, sharp, and incredibly funny." — Telegraph (UK)

DEC/JAN 99 - AudioFile

Most writers would have trouble producing a full page of the rich zaniness with which Terry Pratchett fills entire novels. His comic fantasies have plots and characters, but they're really about language. They beg to be read aloud but place an enormous demand on the narrator's understanding and control. Planer's performance calls forth adjectives like "masterful," "definitive" and "hilarious." The plot: young Carrot (he's shaped like one) leaves his foster home among the dwarves to join the legendary (all right, notorious) Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork, equipped with nothing but a pure heart and an ancestral sword. There are also dragons. J.N. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159861788
Publisher:	Random House UK
Publication date:	05/25/2023
Series:	Discworld Series
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	350,523

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

This is where the dragons went.

They lie...

Not dead, not asleep. Not waiting, because waiting implies expectation. Possibly the word we're looking for here is...

...dormant.

And although the space they occupy isn't like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of a tail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings and your eyeballs eventually realize that the space between each dragon is, in fact, another dragon.

They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly and proud and arrogant.

And presumably, somewhere, there's the key.