Thud!

By: Terry Pratchett

Narrated by: Stephen Briggs

Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch will be damned if he lets anyone disturb his city's always tentative peace, and that includes a rabble-rousing dwarf from the sticks who's been stirring up trouble on the eve of the anniversary of one of Discworld's most infamous historical events.

Centuries earlier, in a hellhole called Koom Valley, trolls met dwarfs in bloody combat. Though nobody's quite sure why they fought or who actually won, each species still bears the cultural scars and views the other with simmering animosity. Lately, an influential dwarf, Grag Hamcrusher, has been fomenting unrest among Ankh-Morpork's more diminutive citizens. And it doesn't help matters when the pint-size provocateur is discovered beaten to death, with a troll club lying nearby.

Vimes knows the well-being of his city depends on his ability to solve the Hamcrusher homicide. But there's more than one corpse waiting for him in the vast mine network the dwarfs have been excavating beneath Ankh-Morpork's streets. A deadly puzzle is pulling Sam Vimes deep into the muck and mire of superstition, hatred, and fear, and perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself.

©2005 Terry Pratchett (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

• 2005 Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award, Science-Fiction/Fantasy

"Pratchett's fantastic imagination and satirical wit are on full display." (Publishers Weekly)

It's Pratchett in fine form

One of my favorites, maybe not my #1 City Watch book (Nightwatch) but very good

Terry Pratchett was a Genius!

A solid, lovely story with a host of interesting characters and their exploits that make me truely love Discworld! NEXT!!!

Irony, parody and some really great laughs

Terry Pratchett's latest Vime's work is a wonder. Somehomw he manages to seemlessly weave parodying Da Vinci Code together with confronting the horrors of racial hatred and classic parental angst to create a story that is truly an entertaining marvel. Although, I can't say this is his best book it certainly is a lot better than some of his early work and follows his consistently trend of steady improvement. Terry Pratchett is a marvel of creative skill and talent and his latest outing is no exception to his extraordinary skill.

One of his better ones

What did you love best about Thud!?

An excellent story with drama, pathos, humor, suspense ... all the good stuff!

What did you like best about this story?

I liked the darkness of it

Have you listened to any of Stephen Briggs’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Stephen Briggs is ALWAYS fabulous

A great story

Ive always loved Terry Pratchett & his audiobooks make for great entertainment when I am on long drives

Always a fantastic read (listen)

Just a fantastic book. No one writes as well as Pratchett did. He can reel you into an impossible world full of silliness and imagined beings, and you feel more at home and authentic there than in reality.
Thud gives us more Sam Vimes - and as a father, which is brilliant and humanizing. As always the story can be superimposed over many current events and make you wish Mister Vimes would step into our reality and help set a few people straight.

Excellent

Classic Pratchett, well written, humorous, and fun, with action and morals as well. Vimes in one of his best.

Great listen, good narration, Terry Pratchett

I was a fan of Terry Pratchett growing up, apparently you don't outgrow his stories. Thud! is now one of my favorites, witty, funny, and engaging. If you're a fan of fantasy or Terry Pratchett I highly recommend this title. If you're a fan of books I highly recommend it as well.

A fantastic (and funny) story!

The Sam Bikes stories are some of the best! This may arguably be the best one of them!

It isn't fantasy in the first place....

What made the experience of listening to Thud! the most enjoyable?

By any measure and from any point of view, Terry Pratchett is very Very Funny - and most especially because he can be so very VERY GRIM. He had the intangible gift that we appreciate in Shakespeare and Mozart, among others; he is witty on many levels simultaneously and it is less important what his understanding of humor might be because our own is a subset of his, at best.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Every last one of Terry Pratchett's characters are three (or four) dimensional. Each has an entire life, though that life may only have been sketched in three paragraphs over the course of a single novel. In the case of Thud!, Sir Samuel Vimes is prominently featured at the center stage. I have no doubt that Commander Vimes is a great favorite of many. Certainly he has been one of mine – but the fact of the matter is that all of Pratchett's characters are my favorites. I believe in, identify with, and recognize each and every last one of them. I've known them my entire life. This, I think, is Terry Pratchett's greatest gift to all of us.

Have you listened to any of Stephen Briggs’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

In any event, read Terry Pratchett. If you can't, for whatever reason, listen to Stephen Briggs reading Terry Pratchett. I'm deadly certain that Pratchett heard Stephen Briggs in his head when he wrote this stuff in the first place.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Most of us use fantasy as a means to dull our perceptions and escape our lives – Terry Pratchett fantasies bring our lives into sharp focus and shows us where the borders are.

Any additional comments?

It's my own feeling that Jonathan Swift, with his entire life's work, was hinting at the possibility of Terry Pratchett's work. He was right, of course.