Witches Abroad: A Novel of Discworld

Terry Pratchett

Harper Collins, Oct 13, 2009 - Fiction - 352 pages

"Discworld takes the classic fantasy universe through its logical, and comic, evolution." —Cleveland Plain Dealer

The twelfth installment in the Discworld series from New York Times bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother named Desiderata who had a good heart, a wise head, and poor planning skills—which, unfortunately, left the Princess Emberella in the care of her other (not quite so good and wise) godmother when death came for Desiderata. So now it's up to Magrat Garlick, Granny Weatherwax, and Nanny Ogg to hop on broomsticks and make for far-distant Genua to ensure the servant girl doesn't marry the Prince.

But the road to Genua is bumpy, and along the way the trio of witches encounters the occasional vampire, werewolf, and falling house (well this is a fairy tale, after all). The trouble really begins once these reluctant foster-godmothers arrive in Genua and must outwit their power-hungry counterpart who'll stop at nothing to achieve a proper "happy ending"—even if it means destroying a kingdom.

The Discworld novels can be read in any order, but Witches Abroad is the third book in the Witches series.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - TobinElliott - LibraryThing

Oh. My. God. I couldn't begin to tell you how often I laughed out loud at this one. Pratchett's wit just seems to get sharper and sharper with each volume.

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Ravenwood1984 - LibraryThing

For Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, things are never simple. When they go on a mission to Genua to stop a wedding that was not meant to be it turns out to be more complicated than usual. They have got Mrs. Gogol's voodoo, Nanny Ogg

Popular passages

Page 2 - Because stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped spacetime, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling ... stories, twisting and blowing through the...

Page 3 - Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.* It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history.

Page 341 - I've heard them say — Second Street is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Page 3 - And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story the groove runs deeper. This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

Page 3 - The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling ... stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness. And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

Page 248 - Since it's too late for you to go out and find some soft gentleman to be your lover, we'll just have to do the best we can with what we've got, won't we?

Page 15 - Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that they exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.1 The Earth has been seen from the moon.

Page 6 - Glod. which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Clods later the spell wore off.

About the author

Sir Terry Pratchett was the internationally bestselling author of more than thirty books, including his phenomenally successful Discworld series. His young adult novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal, and Where's My Cow?, his Discworld book for “readers of all ages,” was a New York Times bestseller. His novels have sold more than seventy five million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. Named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature,” Pratchett lived in England. He died in 2015 at the age of sixty-six.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Witches Abroad: A Novel of Discworld
• Author: Terry Pratchett
• Edition: unabridged
• Publisher: Harper Collins, 2009
• ISBN: 0061809721, 9780061809729
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Fantasy / Action & Adventure; Fiction / Fantasy / Humorous; Fiction / Humorous / General