Book Bearings
The Colour of Magic
Part of the Discworld series
- 240 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1983
- 93 editions
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1 About this book
The Discworld is a flat world carried through space on the backs of four elephants, which stand on the shell of a giant turtle. In its biggest city, Ankh-Morpork, the incompetent and cynical wizard Rincewind is hired as guide to Twoflower, a naive insurance clerk from a distant empire who has come to see the sights and who, by local standards, is immensely rich. Trouble follows them at once, and the two are swept across the Disc through four linked adventures. Published in 1983, this is the first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, written as a send-up of the classic fantasy story.
- Fantasy
- Humor
- Satire
- Discworld (Imaginary place)
- Merveilleux
- Parody
- Collectors and collecting
- Rincewind the wizard
2 What to expect
The first Discworld novel, a comic fantasy in four linked episodes: an inept wizard is hired to guide a naive tourist across a flat world full of heroes, dragons, gods and thieves. It is a parody of older sword-and-sorcery stories, loose in plot and packed with puns and asides. The series grew deeper in later books, and this one stops in mid-air, to be picked up by the next, The Light Fantastic.
Good for readers who want: comic fantasy, parody and wordplay, and the start of the Discworld series.
3 About Terry Pratchett
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Terry Pratchett
5 Similar books
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- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
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- Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
- Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
- Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams