Marvellous Discworld, which revolves on the backs of four great elephants and a big turtle, spins into Interesting Times, the 17th outing in Terry Pratchett's rollicking fantasy series. The gods are playing games again, and this time the mysterious Lady opposes Fate in a match of "Destinies of Nations Hanging by a Thread". —Blaise Selby

In Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett continues the fantasy adventures on Discworld—where anything goes. Anything but murder, that is. Commander Vimes of the Watch must investigate a puzzling series of deaths, with help from various trolls and dwarfs. Pratchett's humour and excellent writing skills draw the reader effortlessly into his zany world. Feet of Clay is 19th in the series. —Blaise Selby

Jingo is the 20th of Pratchett's Discworld novels, and the fourth to feature the City Guard of Ankh-Morpork. As Jingo begins, an island suddenly rises between Ankh- Morpork and Al-Khali, capital of Klatch. Both cities claim it. Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, has failed to convince the Ruling Council that force is a bad idea, despite reminding them that they have no army——"I believe one of those is generally considered vital to the successful prosecution of a war." Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch, has to find out who shot the Klatchian envoy, Prince Khufurah, and set fire to their embassy, before war breaks out.

Pratchett's characters are both sympathetic and outrageously entertaining, from Captain Carrot, who always finds the best in people and puts it to work playing football, to Sergeant Colon and his sidekick, Corporal Nobbs, who have "an ability to get out of their depth on a wet pavement". Then there is the mysterious D'reg, 71-hour Ahmed. What is his part in all this, and why 71 hours? Anyone who doesn't mind laughing themselves silly at the idiocy of people in general and governments in particular will enjoy Jingo. —Nona Vero

Carpe Jugulum is the 23rd Discworld novel, and with it this durable series continues its juggernaut procession onwards. Pratchett is an author who inspires such devotions that his fans will fall on the novel with cries of joy. Non-fans, perhaps, will want to know what all the fuss is about; and that's something difficult to put into a few words. The best thing to do for those completely new to Pratchett is to sample him for themselves, and this novel is as good a place to start as any. But fans have a more precise question. They know that Discworld novels come in one of two varieties: the quite good, and the brilliant. So, for instance, where Hogfather and Maskerade were quite good, Feet of Clay and Jingo were brilliant. While true fans wouldn't want to do without the former, they absolutely live for the latter. And with Carpe Jugulum Pratchett has hit jackpot again. This novel is one of the brilliant ones.

The plot is a version of an earlier Discworld novel, Lords and Ladies, with the predatory elves of that novel being replaced here by suave and deadly vampires, and the tiny kingdom of Lancre being defended by its witches. But plot is the least of Pratchett's appeal, and Carpe Jugulum is loaded with marvellous characters (not least the witches themselves, about whom we learn a deal more here), comic touches and scenes of genius, and even some of the renowned down-to-earth Pratchett wisdom (here about the inner ethical conflicts we all face, and the wrongness of treating people as things). Pratchett's vampires are elegant Bela Lugosi types, and they come up against an unlikely but engaging alliance of witches, blue-skinned pixies like Rob Roy Smurfs, a doubting priest with a boil on his face and a magical house-sized Phoenix in a seamless, completely absorbing and feel-good-about-the- universe mixture. Highly recommended. —Adam Roberts

The Truth is Terry Pratchett's 25th novel about Discworld in general and the dirt-encrusted metropolis of Ankh-Morpork in particular—home of the sinister Patrician, the Unseen University of magicians and guilds for everything from Assassins to Thieves, taking in Clowns (but not mimes) along the way. Ankh-Morpork has weathered several influxes of technology in its time—a demon-inspired invention of the movies, the brief fad for Music with Rocks in it—and now it has acquired a free press, dedicated newshounds, dwarf printers with not especially nasty tempers (for dwarves), and people who want to see their amusing vegetables in the "On a Lighter Note" section. The business of politics (attempts by the old aristocracy to unseat the Patrician) is ratcheted up a notch and Vimes, of the City Watch, is in a worse temper than usual. William de Worde, editor, reporter and investigator, is another attractive Pratchett hero, captured for us in the middle of wonderfully parodied routines from old movies and fiction that he, in his world, is doing for the first time. This is inventive farce with touches of high seriousness and ethical good sense, and two of the nastiest doomed hitmen outside Tarantino. —Roz Kaveney

The new Discworld novel Night Watch has the power and energy that characterizes Terry Pratchett at his occasional best, as well as the wild surreal humour he always gives us. Sam Vimes, running hero of the Guards sequence, finds himself cast back in time to the Ankh-Morpork of his youth—a much nastier city, with an actively deranged Patrician and a sadistic secret police—and finding himself filling in for Keel, the tough honest copper who teaches the young Vimes everything he knows. And, more worryingly, who dies heroically in the insurrection Vimes knows to be imminent. With a psychopath from his own time rising in the vile ranks of the Cable Street Unmentionables complicating things, Vimes has to ensure that history takes its course so that he will have the right future to go back to, and to keep his younger self alive—this is Pratchett's plotting at its most thoroughly constructed and wonderfully devious. Ankh-Morpork has for a long time been one of the most thoroughly imagined cities in fantasy—here Pratchett gives us a fascinating gloomy glimpse of its past and of the younger selves of some of his best-loved characters, and of the brief-lived People's Republic of Treacle-Mine Road. —Roz Kaveney

Terry Pratchett took a side step away from Discworld in The Unadulterated Cat, a hilarious insight into the world of the feline. Amusingly illustrated by cartoonist Gray Jolliffe, Pratchett delivers a wonderfully funny collection of anecdotes that anyone, cat owner or not, will be hard pressed not to smile at. Not quite a replacement for a Discworld novel, but your sides will split just the same. —Jonathan Weir

Robbed of lands and heritage by the rapacious Vulkings, young Airar Alvarson had only his limited gift for sorcery to aid him against a world of savage intrigues. Then he met a mysterious sorcerer and was given a strange iron ring — a ring that led him into a futile conspiracy and soon had him fleeing for his life.

Driven by enchantments and destiny, he found himself leading a band of warriors against the mighty empire of the Vulkings. With him was a warrior maid who mocked him while she sought to serve by fair means or foul. Then he met the Imperial Princess who preached the peace of the Well but it soon became apparent she would bring him only turmoil and strife!

Paul Mitchell spends his days locked in the past researching World War I. Until, that is, the present catches up with him in the shape of Dr Audley of the MoD. Why does Audley want to know the truth about the battle for Hameau Ridge on the Somme in 1916? The answer is complex and dangerous.

In this, the author's 14th David Audley novel, Oliver St John Latimer - the Deputy-Director of the Research and Development Section of British Intelligence - is sent to deepest Georgia. Here he follows in the footsteps of General Sherman's troops to the Sion Crossing ruins, with fearful results.

Dr David Audley is in Rome without authorization and alarm bells start to ring in British Intelligence. The head of Italian security is also interested in his arrival, particularly as it has flushed from cover a rogue communist. The author won the CWA's Gold Dagger Award for "Other Paths to Glory".

Dunblane, Port Arthur and Hungerford will be places known to many of us because of the apparently random mass shootings that have happened there in recent years. The Extremes is a book about such violence—it—it's horror, the sheer bad luck of being its victim, and the anguish it causes to those left behind. It is also a book about virtual reality, and is set in a not-so-distant future in which events of violence can be experienced by anyone prepared (or able) to pay for the privilege.

After her husband has been violently killed in the U.S., Teresa Simons returns to the land of her birth and visits Bulverton, a (fictional) town on the south coast of England which has recently been torn apart by a massacre. She discovers that the ExEx or Extreme Experience virtual reality equipment she used as an FBI trainee has become public "entertainment" put together from people's memories of specific events by vast international companies (and also by shareware programmers). As she becomes embroiled in researching past events in Bulverton, virtual and true realities intertwine with disturbing outcomes.

Priest writes a good yarn, marrying fantasy and horrific reality in a gripping and suspenseful tale. —Sandra Vogel

Christopher Priest excels at rethinking SF themes, lifting them above genre expectations into his own tricky, chilling, metaphysically dangerous territory. The Separation suggests an alternate history lying along a road not taken in World War II. But there are complications.

In 1999, history author Stuart Gratton is intrigued by a minor mystery of the European war which ended on 10 May 1941. The British-German armistice signed that month has had far-reaching consequences, including a resettlement of European Jews in Madagascar.

In 1936, the identical twin brothers Joe and Jack Sawyer win a rowing medal for Britain in the Berlin Olympics: it's presented to them by Rudolf Hess. The brothers are separated not only by a twin's fierce need "to be treated as a separate human being", but by sexual rivalry and even ideology. When war breaks out Jack becomes a gung-ho bomber pilot, Joe a conscientious objector. Still they're inescapably linked, and sometimes confused. Both suffer injuries and hauntingly similar ambulance journeys. Churchill writes a puzzled memo (later unearthed by Gratton) about the anomaly of a registered-pacifist Red Cross worker flying planes for Bomber Command. Hess has significant, eventually incompatible meetings with both men. Contradictions are everywhere.

As in his magical 1995 novel The Prestige Priest is fruitfully fascinated by the legerdemain of twins, doubles, impostors, symmetrical roles. Churchill's double briefly appears. So does the famous conspiracy theory that the Hess who flew to Britain with his quixotic peace deal wasn't the real Hess ring true? Clearly The Separation was impressively, extensively researched. Its evocations of bombing raids—from either side of the bomb sites—are memorable.

The unfolding story strands become increasingly disorienting and hallucinatory; the easy escape route of dismissing one strand as delusion is itself subtly undermined. The Separation is filled with a sense of the precariousness of history; of small events and choices with extraordinary consequences. —David Langford

Malcolm Pryce's witty and scabrous comic thriller Aberystwyth Mon Amour is an original and diverting entry into the field of black-comedy writing—a genre which has enjoyed a long and healthy lineage, from Voltaire through Evelyn Waugh to the present day although lately it is pretty well the preserve of crime fiction. Making the unexciting Welsh town of Aberystwyth seem as fascinating and dangerous for his hardboiled 'tec as the mean streets of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles is a daunting task but it's a trick Pryce pulls off with considerable aplomb.

Throughout Aberystwyth, schoolboys are vanishing without trace, and Louie Knight, the town's only private investigator, becomes involved when he has a visit from the exotic singer Myfanwy Montez (love the name!). She is the star of Wales' most outrageous nightclub, and is keen for Louie to track down her missing cousin, known as Evans the Boot. Aided by such eccentrics as philosopher-cum-ice-cream seller Sospan, Louie finds himself encountering a plot quite as labyrinthine as any which exercised Philip Marlowe. Surely Lovespoon, Grand Wizard of the Druids and the town's most powerful citizen, had a hand in the disappearances?

Nothing is quite as it seems in Pryce's outrageous and irreverent tale, which functions as a canny thriller as much as a wry parody. A good deal of the humour comes from relocating Chandler's sun-baked California locales to a parochial Welsh town, and all the clichés are ruthlessly exploded: Louie is visited in his seedy office by his sultry female client in time-honoured fashion. But it's the language, which leaps off the page, that really marks Pryce out as a stylist of no mean skill, and his bizarre refraction of Marlowe-speak is a real delight: By the time I reached the whelk stall the drizzle had finally made up its mind and turned into rain, driving forward hard off the sea and into my face. The booth was quiet: no-one there except a kid in charge—a pimply adolescent in a grubby white coat and a silly cardboard hat. I ordered the special and waited, as the youth kept a wary eye on me; trouble was never far away at this time of night. . —Barry Forshaw

Lyra's life is already sufficiently interesting for a novel before she eavesdrops on a presentation by her uncle Lord Asriel to his colleagues in the Jordan College faculty, Oxford. The college, famed for its leadership in experimental theology, is funding Lord Asriel's research into the heretical possibility of the existence of worlds unlike Lyra's own, where everyone is born with a familiar animal companion, magic of a kind works, the Tartars are threatening to overrun Muscovy, and the Pope is a puritanical Protestant. Set in an England familiar and strange, Philip Pullman's lively, taut story is a must-read and re-read for fantasy lovers of all ages. The world-building is outstanding, from the subtle hints of the 1898 Tokay to odd quirks of language to the panserbjorne, while determined, clever Lyra is strongly reminiscent of Joan Aiken's Dido Twite.

At the end of The Northern Lights, Lyra Silvertongue watched in fear and fascination as her father, Lord Asriel, created a bridge between worlds. Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon, are now lost in an alternate universe where they meet Will Parry, a fugitive from a third universe. Will has found a small window between Cittagazze (a place where children roam unchecked but invisible Specters suck the spirit out of adults) and his Oxford, which, with its Burger Kings and cars, is frighteningly different from the Oxford Lyra knows.

Will's father, an explorer, disappeared years ago, but recently some odd characters have started asking questions about him, and now, having accidentally killed one of them, Will is wanted by the police. Armed with the Subtle Knife, a tool that cuts any material (including that which separates universes) and Lyra's alethiometer, the children set out to find John Parry, with adults of various stripes in desperate pursuit.

Lyra's finest qualities, her courage and quick mind, are stretched to the limit as she has to lie, cheat and steal to keep herself and Will out of danger. However, she must also learn when to tell the truth and when to trust, for, though she does not yet know it, she has a huge part to play in the upcoming battle between Good and Evil.

Philip Pullman brings The Amber Spyglass to the spellbinding "His Dark Materials" sequence, which dazzles everyone who reads it, children and adults alike. After the original Northern Lights, he kept up the quality in The Subtle Knife, the second title in the trilogy. Now he brings the series to an extraordinary conclusion. Will and Lyra, the two children at the heart of the books, have become separated amidst great dangers. Can they find each other, and their friends? Then complete their mysterious quest before it's too late? The great rebellion against the dark powers that hold Lyra's world, and many others, in thrall is nearing its climax. She and Will have crucial parts to play, but they don't know what it is that they must do, and terrible powers are hunting them down.

The pace of the book is compelling, the writing powerful. Pullman's plotting is intricate and cunning, surprising the reader again and again. Perhaps what is most striking of all, however, is the depth of the characterisation. Lord Asriel, Mrs Coulter, Iorek Byrnison the king of the armoured bears, a host of minor characters, most of all Will and Lyra themselves: the book is a library of beautifully drawn, remarkably convincing characters walking in worlds of marvels.

In this volume the cosmic dimensions of the story become more prominent, as a great conflict across many universes comes to a head—how well the narrative sustains such immensely weighty resonances is a question critics may well disagree on. The author's beliefs also come more into the open, and with them a polemic anti-religious theme that will please some readers and alienate others.

Philip Pullman's writing commands immense respect; more than that, it is raising the profile of the best children's books among adults, as demanding critics of all ages fall in love with this remarkable trilogy. —David Pickering

Robert Rankin's comic fantasies have a laddish good humour which rely heavily, if not excessively, on teasing, class and beer. His protagonists are always forced to compete in a world in which someone else has a silver spoon in their mouth; they muddle their way through his amiably Heath-Robinsonish plots by a mixture of chutzpah, bluster and endurance. Porrig, hero of Apocalypso has a bad attitude that makes even his parents dislike him, but he inherits a shop from a conjuror uncle—a shop which serves as a gateway to other worlds. Not only has he to redeem his uncle from damnation, he also has to save the world from an unpleasant alien vegetable with the power to cloud human minds. Amid all this, we find out what Nelson's Column is for, why railway ticket clerks take so long to sell tickets and the secret that lurks under Mornington Crescent Underground Station. Rankin's humour is a scatter-shot that misses targets as often as it hits, but his unabashed preparedness to use old jokes and the crudest of slapstick is part of a shaggy-dog enthusiasm that is more endearing than otherwise. —Roz Kaveney

Ever since his comic-sinister debut The Antipope—published for the first time in 1981, or 2 BD(Before Discworld)—Robert Rankin has repeatedly returned to that most haunted region of mythic England: Brentford. Snuff Fiction is the biography of local entrepreneur Doveston (1949-2008) as seen by lifelong friend and enemy Edwin, beginning with richly comic evocations of 1950s schoolboy folklore. Like lurking water-vipers in the park: "If you took a piddle in the boating lake, they would swim up the stream of pee and enter your knob." Doveston's insanely ambitious schemes begin with house-wrecking dope parties and the doomed 1967 Brentstock rock festival, with Edwin the scapegoat for every disaster. Those resisting the inexorable Doveston rise to wealth and power have accidents involving dynamite. Presently he's making nefarious deals with our secret Government, culminating in a millennium party at Castle Doveston where celebrities like Michael Jackson meet sticky ends. Rankin produces a fascinating flow of misinformation about puberty, gypsies (native language Esperanto), yo-yos (is there a manoeuvre called "splitting the beaver"?), Brentford's many ethnic quarters (e.g. Mexican, Navajo, Kalahari Bushmen), rhyming slang (Richard= Richard Dadd= mad) and snuff-sniffing. The awful secret of the Millennium Bug is revealed. Uninhibitedly anarchic farce, full of bizarre verbal inventiveness and dreadful old jokes. Read it and sneeze. —David Langford

Robert Rankin's wondrously oddball fantasies have caused addicted readers' heads to spontaneously explode on five separate continents, most of them in Brentford. Some call him the Terry Pratchett of seedy suburbia, but only if they want a punch in the chops...

Waiting for Godalming reports the greatest case of private eye Lazlo Woodbine, hired to investigate God's murder and the suspicious fact that Earth was inherited not by the meek but by God's other son Colin—edited out of the Bible when Jesus got full artistic control. Woodbine is strong on gunplay, dark alleys, rooftop confrontations and talking bizarre drivel in bars, but one worries about the Holy Guardian Sprout called Barry living inside his head.

Meanwhile, light-fingered Icarus Smith discovers the "Red Head" reality pills that reveal the disguised demons among us for the awful, scaly, insect-mouthed horrors that they are. Meanwhile, Prof. Bruce Partington's "spectremeter" device raises ghosts but can't make them go away again. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists will shiver to the dread Ministry of Serendipity hidden under Mornington Crescent station, and its awful uses for barbers' chairs.

As Rankin's anarchic storylines go, this is unusually sober and logical. There's a flood of running gags, self-referential japes, author interjections, allusions to a million Sherlock Holmes titles, and deranged one-liners like this architectural description of Wisteria Lodge:

To the original Georgian pile had been added a Victorian bubo, an Edwardian boil and a nineteen-thirties cyst.

Full of inspired silliness throughout, this is Rankin in good form. —David Langford

Robert Rankin's fondness for demented conspiracy theories is complicated by time travel in The Witches of Chiswick—which demonstrates again that everything you know is wrong, that Brentford is the true centre of the multiverse, and that nobody is quite as weird as Robert Rankin.

Will Starling lives in a dystopian 23rd century where Brentford Utility Conurbation is crammed with 303-storey tower blocks and synthetic food has made everyone vastly obese. Except for Will, who's mocked for morbid slimness and eccentric tastes—art, for example. When he notices the digital watch in a well-known Victorian painting, a murderous cover-up begins. The sinister Witches of Chiswick are determined to erase all traces of the other past.

Time-travelling Terminator-style automata keep arriving, not from the future but from that lost Victorian age of Babbage supercomputers, flying cabs running on beamed power from Tesla transmitters and the imminent launch of Her Majesty's Moonship Victoria. Thanks to the convenient time machine of a Mr Wells, Will finds himself in that other 19th century, complicating the stories of his own ancestors.

There he's tutored by the flamboyant guru or conman Hugo Rune. He stands in for Sherlock Holmes—called away to a Dartmoor case—and investigates the Jack-the-Ripper murders. As tends to happen in the Rankin universe, he acquires a Holy Guardian Sprout called Barry. Will even meets himself, another Will from a very different future. Even aided by his best friend Tim, by the Brentford Snail Boy (raised like Tarzan by wild animals, not apes but snails), and by the deadly martial art Dimac, can Will hope to foil a witchy plan to reprogram time and send high-tech Britain back to gaslight as midnight strikes on December 31, 1899?

Other walk-ons include Queen Victoria, the Elephant Man, William McGonagall (Poet Laureate), Doctor Watson, the Invisible Man, Oscar Wilde (a notorious womaniser), Wells' Martians, and—in unfamiliar guise—Satan. It's all suitably dotty, larded with running gags and bursts of disarming frankness: ... Perhaps both futures always existed. I don't know. This is very complicated, Tim, and I don't understand it. I'm just making it up as I go along. Like the author," said Tim.

But rather than wrap-up this novel with any of a dozen deus ex machina possibilities, Rankin leaves his hero with a very tough decision indeed. The insane, goonish humour made more effective by a touch of grimness. —David Langford

Set on an ancient starship as big as Jupiter, Marrow is epic hard science fiction with a millennia spanning plot. A near immortal, genetically re-engineered humanity is the first to reach the derelict ship, approaching from the emptiness of intergalactic space. Taking command, the captains set the ship on a half-million year long galactic cruise, opening the vessel to thousands of races and playing host as in Babylon 5. The ship itself demands parallels with Arthur C Clarke's Rama from Rendezvous with Rama though Reed offers literally bigger surprises..."Just tell us please... what in hell is down there?"
"A spherical object," she replied. And with a slow wink she added, "It's the size of Mars, about. But considerably more massive." Washen's heart began to gallop. The audience let out a low, wounded groan.
"Show them," the Master said to her AI. "Show them what we found." Disaster strikes and a group of captains become trapped on the world they name "Marrow". Factions develop, leading to civil war and insurrection, coupled with labyrinthine personal intrigues played out across thousands of years. Given the immortal captains' willingness to decapitate one another, Highlander comes to mind, but while Reed's ideas are interesting he never develops his characters sufficiently to convincingly explain how they cope with the potential tedium of immortality. There are plenty of "big ideas" but it becomes increasingly hard to care about any of Reed's alienated post-humans, while the partially satisfactory ending offers as many possibilities for a sequel as it provides answers.—Gary S Dalkin

Mouse, a hard-bitten, cynical woman and professional thief, finds herself in deep trouble when her attempt to rescue a seemingly helpless little girl has potentially deadly consequences in this brilliant and haunting installment of Santiago-inspired adventure. Young Penelope has long had a price on her head, and Carlos Mendoza now knows how she has outwitted her captors—and the awesome powers behind her success. As Carlos moves in for the kill, Mouse is hard-pressed to preserve her life, defend Penelope, and in so doing, save humanity. For Carlos "Iceman" Mendoza, only one thing becomes clear: in a universe of giant men, ruthless bounty hunters, and interstellar war, his greatest fear is this one girl.

Grown to womanhood and residing on the planet Hades, feared oracle Penenlope Bailey becomes the prey of a bounty hunter, a government agent, and an outlaw cyborg.