The trouble with being a Pratchett fan these days is the mixture of joy and trepidation with which you greet each new book - will it be any good? Will this one be the one where the Alzheimer's starts to show?

Thankfully, so far there's been no noticeable drop in quality (well, with the minor exception of The Long Earth, and I put that more down to the collaboration with Stephen Baxter). In fact, there've been some really wonderful books, and this one's no exception.

Pratchett continues his development of Ankh-Morpork in a quasi-Victorian age of new inventions and ideas - this time the railway (and if the grin in the author photo is anything to go by, he's been looking for an excuse to research steam engines for a very long time). There's the usual "new idea causes upheavals" plot of the Lipwig von Moist stories (though with enough else going on for it to not feel at all stale), plus of course further advances in the rapid changes in society which have been meta-arcing across the Discworld books for some time now.

Definitely one I'll be going back to again and again.

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