"Brilliant, and on everybody's reading list." — SFreviews.net

"At once brilliant and ludicrous, borrowing heavily from traditional mythology and fantasy writings, and then turns them on their heads, spins them around, flips them inside out and mirrors them onto the page. Nothing is the same when you step inside the world of Discworld, and you love Pratchett for it." — Fantasy Book Review (UK)

"There's no wrong place to start reading Pratchett. . . . The film-noir-with-dragons novel Guards! Guards!, the series starting point for sharp, dutiful City Watch head Commander Vimes, is [a] solid entryway." — NPR

"As traumatic as it is to only choose one Pratchett, this first entry in his Guards sub-series encompasses everything that is brilliant about his writing: terrific characterisation and plotting, a completely believable world, and new details that come up with each re-reading. Thirty years after it was published, the story of dwarves, dragons and good police work remains fresh, sharp, and incredibly funny." — Telegraph (UK)

Most writers would have trouble producing a full page of the rich zaniness with which Terry Pratchett fills entire novels. His comic fantasies have plots and characters, but they're really about language. They beg to be read aloud but place an enormous demand on the narrator's understanding and control. Planer's performance calls forth adjectives like "masterful," "definitive" and "hilarious." The plot: young Carrot (he's shaped like one) leaves his foster home among the dwarves to join the legendary (all right, notorious) Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork, equipped with nothing but a pure heart and an ancestral sword. There are also dragons. J.N. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine