Soul Music – Josh Kirby Paperback – Letterbox Edition

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett – Penguin Letterbox Edition (Josh Kirby cover)

This did not feel like magic. It felt older than that. It felt like music.

Being sixteen is difficult. It is harder when your grandfather is Death, rides a pale horse and keeps a scythe in the hall. Susan Sto Helit has been raised to be sensible. Then Grandfather walks out of the job, looking for whatever it is living people keep going on about, and the family business will not wait. People keep mistaking her for the Tooth Fairy. The paperwork of mortality does not care.

Somewhere in Ankh-Morpork a harp becomes a guitar. Imp y Celyn (you can call him Buddy), Glod the dwarf and Cliff the troll form a band. C.M.O.T. Dibbler smells money. Unseen University’s wizards smell trouble. The new sound is lawless. It changes people. It has a beat you can dance to. It is called Music With Rocks In, and it is alive in a way that songs are not supposed to be. Dead Man’s Curve is waiting. So is a very old kind of hunger that wears a backbeat.

First published in 1994, Soul Music is Discworld novel 16 and the third book in the Death sequence, after Mort and Reaper Man. It is Pratchett on rock and roll, fame, grief and the girl who would rather do her homework than inherit infinity. You can read it alone. Susan, Death and the Band With Rocks In are better if you already know the household on the edge of the Disc.

This new Letterbox paperback from Penguin uses Josh Kirby’s original cover painting. Kirby at full volume: guitar, scythe, and a world that has just discovered the chorus.

• Discworld novel 16
• Death series book 3
• Publisher: Penguin
• Cover artist: Josh Kirby
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 432
• Size: approx. 198 mm × 128 mm × 28 mm