Mort

Mort was published in 1987 and is the fourth Discworld novel, the comic fantasy series Terry Pratchett eventually wrote more than forty books in. It is the first of them to give Death a book of his own: the character had appeared in earlier volumes as a running joke, and here he takes on an apprentice because he has decided he would like a day off. Pratchett said later that Mort was the first Discworld novel he was pleased with, on the grounds that in the earlier books the plot existed to support the jokes rather than the other way round.

The book works as a machine about duty. Death is written as a craftsman who is scrupulous about his work and increasingly curious about what the people he visits are doing; Mort is a boy who cannot leave well alone and who discovers that the universe has rules about what happens when you interfere with the schedule. Pratchett's version of the afterlife is bureaucratic and rural by turns, and the hourglass that measures a life is the detail that carries the plot.

The series as a whole takes place on a flat world carried through space on the back of a turtle, and the books can be read in any order, although the author recommended publication order for the first few. Mort sits near the beginning of the run, and it is one of the volumes most often handed to a reader who has never tried Pratchett at all. Stephen Briggs adapted it for the stage in 1992, and it has since been a graphic novel, a BBC radio play and a stage musical, which is how Death went from a running joke to one of the series' main characters.