Product Description

Moist von Lipwig is a con artist...and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork's ailing postal service back on its feet. It's a tough decision. But he's got to see that the mail gets through, come rain, hail, sleet, dogs, the Post Office Workers' Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer. Getting a date with Adora Bell Dearheart would be nice, too...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4268 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Released on: 2005-09-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 429 pages

Review
A satirist of enormous talent' THE TIMES.

Guardian
'This darkness and concrete morality sets his work apart from imitators of his English Absurd school of comic fantasy.'

Financial Times
'Pratchett...is the missing link between Douglas Adams and J.K. Rowling...Wit and imagination have gained him a fanatical readership.'

Customer Reviews

Pratchett turns out another master work
I've been reading the Discworld novels since about 1989, and I believe that Going Postal is the 33rd book in the series - and honestly there hasn't been a bad book in the lot, and in many ways Terry Pratchett improves as a writer with every book he releases. GOING POSTAL is in some ways a throw-back to his earlier books, being the first book for quite a while that's divided into chapters, and with more of the hilarious footnotes that were a favourite feature of his earlier books. However, it still maintains the deeper characterisation and depth of his more recent works, and the very strong story-telling. Pratchett's great gift is using his fantasy world to make wry satirical observations about our everyday world, and the nature of human existence and weakness - without being at all heavy going to read. A true British institution, and I look forward to many more Discworld books :)

Pratchett at his best
I love Terry Pratchett books, I really really do. They're brilliant. Pure, unadulterated genius.

This book follows the story of a con artist as he tries, with the flair of a natural showman, to get the Ankh-Morpork post office up and running against the competition: the clacks, semaphore towers which can send a message across country and next to no time, but are run by a bunch of money grabbers who don't care about the clacks themselves, only what the towers can do for them.

Old favourite discworld characters make small appearances. Vimes is seen, but not heard. Carrot and Angua pop in briefly for a chat, Colon loiters outside a building, the librarian is seen in the background. But the patrician....ahh...gotta love that man. Many of Ankh-Morpork's inhabitants seem to forget that he is actually a tyrant, and therefore doesn't have to justify himself to anyone. And there are the golems, and they always make me smile.

You've got the fantastic clash between the bad guy and the bad guy. The bad guy who really is a good guy, just not interested in honest work, and the bad guy who appears to do honest work, but really is a bad guy.

Totally excellent
I have the full collection and this is by far the most entertaining and truely delightful plot with believeable characters and lots of laugh out loud moments. I'd recommend it to everyone