Terry Pratchett Reading Order

Below is the complete list of Terry Pratchett books in reading order, presented in publication order for the series. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.

Discworld Series

1. The Colour of Magic (1983)
2. The Light Fantastic (1986)
3. Equal Rites (1987)
4. Mort (1987)
5. Sourcery (1988)
6. Wyrd Sisters (1988)
7. Pyramids (1989)
8. Guards! Guards! (1989)
9. Eric (1990)
10. Moving Pictures (1990)
11. Reaper Man (1991)
12. Witches Abroad (1991)
13. Small Gods (1992)
14. Lords and Ladies (1992)
15. Men at Arms (1993)
16. Soul Music (1994)
17. Interesting Times (1994)
18. Maskerade (1995)
19. Feet of Clay (1996)
20. Hogfather (1996)
21. Jingo (1997)
22. The Last Continent (1998)
23. Carpe Jugulum (1998)
24. The Fifth Elephant (1999)
25. The Truth (2000)
26. Thief of Time (2001)
27. The Last Hero (2001)
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001)
29. Night Watch (2002)
30. The Wee Free Men (2003)
31. Monstrous Regiment (2003)
32. A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
33. Going Postal (2004)
34. Thud! (2005)
35. Wintersmith (2006)
36. Making Money (2007)
37. Unseen Academicals (2007)
38. I Shall Wear Midnight (2010)
39. Snuff (2011)
40. Raising Steam (2013)
41. The Shepherd’s Crown (2015)

Science Of Discworld Series
with Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen

1. The Science of Discworld (1999)
2. The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (2002)
3. The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch (2005)
4. The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day (2013)

Discworld Companion Series

1. The Streets of Ankh Morpork (1993)
2. The Discworld Companion (1994)
3. The Discworld Mapp (1995)
4. The Pratchett Portfolio (1996)
5. Discworld’s Diary Unseen University Diary 1998 (1997)
6. Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary (1998)
7. A Tourist Guide to Lancre (1998)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
8. Discworld Assassins’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2000 (1999)
9. Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook (1999)
   (With Stephen Briggs, Tina Hannan)
10. Death’s Domain (1999)
11. Discworld Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2001 (2000)
12. GURPS Discworld Also (2000)
    (With Phil Masters)
13. Discworld Thieves’ Guild Yearbook & Diary 2002 (2001)
14. Discworld (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary 2003 (2002)
15. The New Discworld Companion (2003)
16. The Art of Discworld (2004)
17. The Discworld Almanac for the Common Year 2005 (2004)
18. The Ankh-Morpork Post Office Handbook: Discworld Diary 2007 (2006)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
19. The Unseen University Cut-Out Book (2006)
20. Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment (2007)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
21. The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld (2007)
22. The Folklore of Discworld (2008)
    (With Jacqueline Simpson)
23. The Illustrated Eric (2010)
24. The Compleat Ankh-Morpork: City Guide (2012)
25. Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion…So Far (2012)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
26. Discworld Diary: We r Igors 2015: First and Last Aid (2014)
27. Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook: To Travelling Upon the Ankh-Morpork & Sto Plains Hygienic Railway (2014)
28. Discworld 2016 Diary: A Practical Manual for the Modern Witch (2015)
29. The Compleat Discworld Atlas (2015)
30. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Colouring Book (2016)
31. Discworld Diary 2017 (2016)
32. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Diary 2019 (2018)
33. Death and Friends: A Discworld Journal (2019)
34. The Ankh-Morpork City Watch Discworld Journal (2020)
    (With The Discworld Emporium)
35. The Ultimate Discworld Companion (2021)
    (With Stephen Briggs)

Discworld Graphic Novels Series

1. The Colour of Magic (1992)
2. Mort Big Comic (1994)
3. The Light Fantastic (1998)
4. Small Gods (2016)

Discworld Plays Series
with Stephen Briggs

1. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2003)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
2. Going Postal (2005)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
3. Jingo (2005)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
4. Monstrous Regiment (2005)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
5. Hogfather (2007)
   (With Vadim Jean)
6. The Colour of Magic (2009)
   (With Vadim Jean)
7. Carpe Jugulum (2010)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
8. Guards! Guards! (2011)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
9. Interesting Times (2011)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
10. Men at Arms (2011)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
11. Mort (2011)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
12. Wyrd Sisters (2011)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
13. Lords and Ladies (2011)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
14. The Truth (2014)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
15. Making Money (2015)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
16. The Rince Cycle (2015)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
17. All the Discworld’s a Stage (2015)
    (With Stephen Briggs)
18. Maskerade (2015)
    (With Stephen Briggs)

Discworld Picture Series

1. Where’s My Cow? (2005)
2. The World of Poo (2012)

Bromeliad Trilogy Series

1. Truckers (1988)
2. Diggers (1990)
3. Wings (1990)

Children’s Circle Stories Series

1. Dragons at Crumbling Castle (2014)
2. The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories (2016)
3. Father Christmas’s Fake Beard (2017)
4. The Time-Travelling Caveman (2020)

Dodger Series

1. Dodger (2012)
2. Dodger’s Guide to London: Based on Original Notes Penned by Jack Dodger Himself (2013)

Johnny Maxwell Series

1. Only You Can Save Mankind (1992)
2. Johnny and the Dead (1993)
3. Johnny and the Bomb (1996)

Long Earth Series
with Stephen Baxter

1. The Long Earth (2012)
2. The Long War (2013)
3. The Long Mars (2014)
4. The Long Utopia (2015)
5. The Long Cosmos (2016)

Standalone Novels Series

1. The Carpet People (1971)
2. The Dark Side of The Sun (1976)
3. Strata (1981)
4. Good Omens (1990)
   (With Neil Gaiman)
5. Nation (2008)

Short Stories/Novellas Series

1. Turntables of the Night (1989)
2. Theatre of Cruelty (1993)
3. The Abominable Snowman (2014)
4. Shaking Hands with Death (2015)

Short Story Collections Series

1. Once More* with Footnotes (2004)
2. A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction (2012)
3. Dragons at Crumbling Castle and Other Tales (2014)
4. Seriously Funny (2016)
5. The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Vol. 1 (2019)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
6. The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Vol. 2 (2020)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
7. A Stroke of the Pen (2023)

Plays Series
with Stephen Briggs

1. Johnny and the Dead (1996)
   (With Stephen Briggs)
2. Nation (2008)
   (With Mark Ravenhill)
3. Johnny and the Bomb (2012)
   (With Matthew Holmes)

Non-Fiction Series

1. The Unadulterated Cat (1989)
2. A Slip of the Keyboard (2014)

About Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett was one of the great comic fantasists in English, but calling him simply “funny” does not quite capture what made his work so enduring. He wrote satire with unusual warmth, built fantastical systems that could hold serious moral thought, and developed a voice that made absurdity feel inseparable from common sense. He is best known for the Discworld novels, a vast sequence that began with The Colour of Magic in 1983 and eventually grew to more than forty books, but his bibliography makes most sense when read as the work of a writer who used fantasy not as escape from reality, but as a sharper way of seeing it.

Born in Beaconsfield in 1948, Pratchett published his first novel, The Carpet People, in 1971, well before Discworld turned him into an international literary institution. Across his career he wrote more than seventy books, including children’s fiction, collaborations, and science fiction as well as fantasy. Still, Discworld is the obvious center of gravity. It is not just his most famous creation; it is the structure through which much of the rest of his work is best understood. The books are linked by setting rather than by one rigid linear plot, and that flexibility is a large part of why reading order can seem complicated. Discworld contains recurring character strands, overlapping subseries, and tonal development across decades, which means the bibliography rewards both publication-order reading and more focused paths through particular groups such as the City Watch, the Witches, or Death novels.

What made Pratchett distinctive was his ability to fuse comic invention with ethical seriousness. His novels are full of jokes, reversals, puns, footnotes, and gleeful genre parody, but underneath the wit is a strong interest in power, justice, institutions, prejudice, belief, civic life, and the strange compromises required to behave decently in an imperfect world. That is why readers who come to Discworld expecting only spoof often end up finding something richer. The books can be playful and outrageous, but they are also humane and intellectually alert. Pratchett understood bureaucracy, folly, vanity, fear, and kindness at a very practical level, and he translated all of that into fantasy without losing either the comedy or the seriousness.

His bibliography is also best understood as more varied than Discworld alone might suggest. He wrote books for younger readers, including the Tiffany Aching novels, which belong to Discworld but have their own clear identity, and he also wrote outside that universe altogether. Good Omens, co-written with Neil Gaiman, remains one of his most famous non-Discworld works, while later collaborations with Stephen Baxter, such as The Long Earth, show another side of his speculative imagination. Even so, those books generally feel like branches from the main trunk rather than an alternative center. Discworld remains the key because it allowed Pratchett to return again and again to the same invented world while approaching different professions, institutions, species, and moral problems from fresh angles.

Pratchett was awarded a knighthood for services to literature, and late in life he also became widely known for his public discussion of Alzheimer’s disease after being diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s. He died in 2015, with The Shepherd’s Crown published that same year as the final Discworld novel. That last detail matters because it gives the reading order real shape: this is a body of work with a beginning, a long and remarkably consistent middle, and an unmistakable final phase. Read across it, Pratchett’s career reveals not just productivity, but control. He kept enlarging the moral and imaginative range of comic fantasy without losing readability or momentum.

The best way to understand Terry Pratchett, then, is as a writer whose books are organized less by prestige hierarchy than by access points. Some readers begin with early Discworld, some with the Watch books, some with Tiffany Aching, some with Good Omens. What matters is that the bibliography holds together because the authorial mind behind it is so recognizable: skeptical, compassionate, amused by human pretension, and deeply committed to the idea that stories can be wildly entertaining while still telling the truth about how people live.