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His wildly inventive plots and characters include an orang-utan librarian and a wooden chest which both eats people and cleans clothes.
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Terry Pratchett |
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Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series of science fiction novels, is one of the best-loved writers of the fantasy/sci-fi genre. The Discworld series are set in a surreal universe on the back of four elephants that stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the sky turtle. There was a huge surge of interest in Terry Pratchett's works after Radio 4 serialised his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic in 1983.
Pratchett's work forms a complex and humorous satire of both our own world and the literary conventions of the genre he writes in. His wildly inventive plots and characters include an orang-utan librarian and a wooden chest which both eats people and cleans clothes.
The author writes for both children and adults and has produced a huge range of works - 65 fantasy books alone - in 1998 he was given an OBE for his services to literature.
Pratchett was born in 1948 - unusually for a writer he didn't express much interest in books until he was 10. By the time he was 15, a short story he originally wrote for an assignment at High Wycombe Technical High School, The Hades Business, was published in Science Fiction magazine. Inspired by this early success he left school and entered the world of local journalism, passing A level English on day release. He lives with his wife Lyn and daughter Rhianna in Somerset.
Guards! Guards! Here's how the publishers describe the book:
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...
Guards! Guards! is the eighth Discworld novel - and after this, dragons will never be the same again
A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it. (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
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