The Shepherd’s Crown, the 41st in the late author’s Discworld series, to be launched with a midnight reading on 26 August

Terry Pratchett’s legions of fans took just minutes to snap up tickets to a midnight bookshop opening in London that will mark the official release of the late author’s final Discworld novel, The Shepherd’s Crown.

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The ticketed event on 26 August, at Waterstones’ store in Piccadilly, will see Pratchett’s assistant and friend Rob Wilkins give the first reading of The Shepherd’s Crown, at 11:15pm, before the 200 fans obtain their books at midnight. A queue outside the shop from 11:30pm will enable those without a ticket to join the event after midnight.

The tickets went on sale at noon today, and were sold out within minutes. With over two weeks remaining before publication, The Shepherd’s Crown is already at No 26 in amazon.co.uk’s bestseller list.

Pratchett completed the book, the fifth Discworld novel to feature the teenage witch Tiffany Aching, last summer. He died in March, leaving behind him 40 novels set in his fantasy creation, the Discworld – The Shepherd’s Crown will be the 41st – as well as a collection of award-winning children’s books, and millions of fans around the world.

“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,” runs the official description of The Shepherd’s Crown from publisher Transworld.

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“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 publisher has given away little else about the contents of the final Discworld novel, although last week it did release some “exclusive deleted scenes” from Tiffany Aching’s “private musings”, including her thoughts on Granny Weatherwax.

“She wondered if Granny Weatherwax ever truly slept. She knew that the old woman lay down on a bed quite often, with a square of cardboard affixed to a string around her neck, and it read ‘I Ate’nt Dead’. In fact it meant that granny was letting her mind ride unnoticed in the mind of a bird or of an animal, to keep an eye on what was happening in the world, and on the other hand perhaps it was there to reassure her if she woke up.”

Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007. Last month, Transworld released the essay he wrote about dying, and assisted death, Shaking Hands With Death, as a separate paperback for the first time, along with a new introduction from Wilkins. Earlier this summer, the fourth novel in the science fiction series about a “long earth”, which Pratchett was co-writing with Stephen Baxter, was published. The final Long Earth novel is yet to be published.