As readers there might be many authors that we love, but there aren’t necessarily very many that are genuinely important to us; for the enjoyment that their books give us, but also on a more personal level as human beings. Terry Pratchett is perhaps the important author to me personally, over and above anyone else before or since, and he has been for a long time. He’s the author whose death hit me the hardest, whose absence I still feel the most, whose books I would choose if I could only choose one author’s books to ever read again. I’ve read every Discworld novel at least twice, some many more times than that…except, actually I haven’t. There’s one that until very recently I had never read – The Shepherd’s Crown, the 41st and final Discworld novel.
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