The young man, whose name is Imp, gets chatting to a troll called Lias, and a dwarf called Glod. And she’s particularly unhappy when she learns that the young musician is due to die… This time, his assistants enlist Susan’s help, although - being human - she finds it quite difficult to do some of the duties. Suddenly she spots a rat with a scythe, who is invisible to anyone else. And, being pragmatic and independent, she follows him… and finds herself taking over from Death, who has gone missing.ĭeath went missing in the book ‘ Reaper Man’, but in that one life went haywire as nobody was able to die. We meet her as a somewhat awkward teenager at an expensive boarding school where she mostly manages to be almost invisible. There are two main storylines: one involves Death’s granddaughter Susan, and the other which involves a young man - a musician from the Discworld equivalent of Wales, seeking his fortune in Ankh-Morpork.

In ‘Soul Music’ he does that very cleverly. I acquired it in 1996, and am pretty sure I read it aloud to my teenage sons around six or seven years later, but I have not read it since then.īy this stage in the series, Pratchett had developed the technique of running several different threads alongside each other, introducing them apparently at random, and then skillfully weaving them together as the book progressed. In my gradual re-reading of Terry Pratchett’s lengthy ‘Discworld’ series, I had reached the sixteenth in the series, ‘Soul Music’. I recalled it as being one of my favourites, although it’s a long time since I read it.

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett