Terry Pratchett - The Shepherds Crown

Terry Pratchett was the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series, the first of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. The Shepherds Crown is his forty-first Discworld novel. His books have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. He died in March 2015.

For more information about Terry Pratchett and his books, please visit www.terrypratchett.co.uk

A SHIVERING OF WORLDS

Deep in the Chalk, something is stirring. The owls and the foxes can sense it, and Tiffany Aching feels it in her boots. An old enemy is gathering strength.

This is a time of endings and beginnings, old friends and new, a blurring of edges and a shifting of power. Now Tiffany stands between the light and the dark, the good and the bad.

As the fairy horde prepares for invasion, Tiffany must summon all the witches to stand with her. To protect the land. Her land.

There will be a reckoning...

THE FINAL DISCWORLD NOVEL

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Despite the effects of his Alzheimers disease, Terry wanted to keep writing as long as possible and was able to do so not least through the assistance of his fine editorial team. Lyn, Rhianna and Rob would most especially like to thank Philippa Dickinson and Sue Cook for their tireless help and encouragement that kept the words flowing.

A Feegle Glossary

Bigjobs: human beings

Big Man: chief of the clan (usually the husband of the kelda)

Blethers: rubbish, nonsense

Bogle: see

Boggin: to be desperate, as in Im boggin for a cup of tea

Brose: porridge with a drop of strong drink added or more than a drop. Be warned: it will put hairs on your chest

Bunty: a weak person

Carlin: old woman

Cludgie: the privy

Corbies: big, black burdies known by most people as crows

Crivens!: a general exclamation that can mean anything from My goodness! to Ive just lost my temper and there is going to be trouble

Dree your/my/his/her weird: facing the fate that is in store for you/me/him/her

Een: eyes

Eldritch: weird, strange; sometimes means oblong too, for some reason

Fash: worry, upset

Geas: a very important obligation, backed up by tradition and magic. Not a bird

Gonnagle: the bard of the clan, skilled in music and stories

Hag: a witch, of any age

Hag o hags: a very important witch

Hagging/Haggling: anything a witch does

Hiddlins: secrets

Kelda: the female head of the clan, and eventually the mother of most of it. Feegle babies are very small, and a kelda will have hundreds in her lifetime

Lang syne: long ago

Last World: the Feegles believe that they are dead. This world is so filled with all they like, they argue, that they must have been really good in a past life and then died and ended up here. Appearing to die here means merely going back to the Last World, which they believe is rather dull

Mowpie: furry animals with white tufts as tails, making them easy to spot. Sometimes called rabbits. Good to eat, especially with a dab of snail relish on the side

Mudlin: useless person

Pished: I am assured that this means tired

Schemie: an unpleasant person

Scuggan: a really unpleasant person

Scunner: a generally unpleasant person

Ships: woolly things that eat grass and go baa. Easily confused with the other kind

Spavie: see

Special Sheep Liniment: probably moonshine whisky, I am very sorry to say. A favourite of the Feegles. Do not try to make this at home

Spog: a small leather bag at the front of a Feegles kilt, which covers whatever he presumably thinks needs to be hidden, and generally holds things like something he is halfway through eating, something hed found that now therefore belongs to him, and whatever he was using as a handkerchief, which might not necessarily be dead

Steamie: only found in the big Feegle mounds in the mountains, where theres enough water to allow regular bathing; its a kind of sauna. Feegles on the Chalk tend to rely on the fact that you can only get so much dirt on you before it starts to fall off of its own accord

Waily: a general cry of despair

19482015

The Shepherds Crown is Terry Pratchetts final novel. It was written in his last year before he finally succumbed in early 2015 to the embuggerance of posterior cortical atrophy. Terry had been diagnosed back in 2007, the year that he wrote Nation. At that time, Terry thought he might have less than two years to live and that brought a new urgency to his writing. He had never been a slouch in this respect but now things were measured by the cost in writing time. If demands for his presence took him away from writing, it had to be really worthwhile, such as feeding the chickens or attending to his tortoises. He had so many more books he wanted to write.

It says a lot for Terrys resilience and determination not to go down without a fight that he wrote five more

Terry usually had more than one book on the go at a time and he discovered what each was about as he went along. He would start somewhere, telling himself the story as he wrote it, writing the bits he could see clearly and assembling it all into a whole like a giant literary jigsaw when he was done. Once it was shaped, he would keep writing it too, adding to it, fixing bits, constantly polishing and adding linking sequences, tossing in just one more footnote or event. His publishers often had to prise the manuscript away from him, as there was always more he felt he could do, even though by then he would be well into the next story which was tugging at his elbow. Eventually the book was sent to the printer, and reluctantly Terry would let it go.

Terry had been thinking about the key elements in Tiffany Aching and Granny Weatherwaxs last story for a few years. He wrote the pivotal scenes while he was still writing Raising Steam and then re-wrote them several times as he shaped the rest of The Shepherds Crown around them.

The Shepherds Crown has a beginning, a middle and an end, and all the bits in between. Terry wrote all of those. But even so, it was, still, not quite as finished as he would have liked when he died.

If Terry had lived longer, he would almost certainly have written more of this book. There are things we all wish we knew more about. But what we have is a remarkable book, Terrys final book, and anything you wish to know more about in here, you are welcome to imagine yourself.

Rob Wilkins
May 2015
Salisbury, UK

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