Night Watch – Paul Kidby Paperback – Letterbox Edition

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett – Penguin Letterbox Edition (Paul Kidby cover)

Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come round again. That is why they are called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.

The twenty-fifth of May is a quiet, lilac day in Ankh-Morpork, unless you were there. Commander Samuel Vimes of the City Watch knows the date in his bones. Crime does not keep anniversaries. A murderer called Carcer does not keep anything except score. The chase goes up onto the roofs of Unseen University, into a storm that is not weather, and Vimes lands in the city of his youth: poorer, crueller, and hours away from a rising that will paint the cobbles.

He is the wrong man in the right uniform. He has to become John Keel, keep his younger self alive, hold a street against the Unmentionables, and decide how much of the future he is allowed to steal. Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs are still learning. Vetinari is not yet Vetinari. The lilac is in bud. Time is not on anyone’s side except the man who already remembers how this ends.

First published in 2002, Night Watch is Discworld novel 29 and the sixth City Watch book. Many readers call it the finest of the sequence: less gag, more copper, a novel about law, memory and the cost of getting the past almost right. You can start here. It is richer if you already know Vimes as a duke who still walks the beat.

This new Letterbox paperback from Penguin uses Paul Kidby’s original cover. Kidby’s first Discworld novel jacket after Josh Kirby: Vimes in the rain, the city behind him, the watchman’s lantern still lit.

• Discworld novel 29
• City Watch book 6
• Publisher: Penguin
• Cover artist: Paul Kidby
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 480
• Size: approx. 198 mm × 128 mm × 30 mm