Going Postal

This is one of the very best of the Discworld books, and furthermore it's one of the most accessible of them. Although plenty of the usual Discworld characters make brief appearances, you don't need to have met them before; and the central characters are brand new, making their first appearances.

The story is of a con man forced to go straight, the enemies he makes in doing so, and the difficult and dangerous woman he falls for. It's set on the Discworld as usual, in the city of Ankh-Morpork, but newcomers can understand it as a rather steampunk alternative-19th-century city with traces of magic about it. However, magic isn't important to this story, which deals in confidence tricks, crooked finance, the running of a postal service, and a sort of primitive Internet using semaphores instead of electrical signals.

The underlying story is serious, but it has bizarre and humorous elements to it. The brand-new central characters are good and worth meeting, and you may also appreciate Lord Vetinari, who appears in most of the Discworld books, being the ruler of the city.

A film has been made of this book, and it's a good film, well acted, but as usual it doesn't do justice to the book because so much has to be cut to make a film.