Night Watch was published by Doubleday in 2002. It is the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, the sixth City Watch book, and by wide consensus Pratchett’s greatest achievement — a novel that transcends its genre so completely that to call it “comic fantasy” is to misrepresent it entirely. It is a book about revolution, memory, justice, and the price of moral compromise, and it is devastating.
Commander Sam Vimes — now the most powerful policeman in Ankh-Morpork, husband to the richest woman in the city, soon to be a father — is pursuing a serial killer across the rooftops when a magical storm hurls both of them thirty years into the past. Vimes arrives in the Ankh-Morpork of his youth: a city ruled by the psychopathic Lord Winder, policed by a Watch that is either corrupt or terrified, on the eve of a revolution.
Vimes’s young self is a raw recruit. His mentor — Sergeant John Keel, the man who made Vimes the copper he became — has been killed by the serial killer who followed Vimes back in time. Vimes must become Keel: must take his name, his badge, his personality, and train his own younger self, all while knowing that the revolution ahead will fail, that good men will die on the barricades for a freedom they will not achieve, and that the compromises of history cannot be undone.
The novel draws explicitly on Les Misérables (the barricades, the revolutionaries, the question of whether violent resistance against tyranny is justified) and on the Tiananmen Square massacre (the state’s willingness to murder its own citizens). It is Pratchett’s most politically engaged book, and his angriest: the satire is replaced by something closer to elegy. The Watch wears lilac on the anniversary — and Pratchett’s readers began wearing lilac on May 25th (the date in the book) in tribute, a tradition that continues after his death.
Collecting Night Watch
First edition (Doubleday, London, 2002): Hardcover, dust jacket by Paul Kidby (who replaced Josh Kirby after his death in 2001).
Market values:
- First edition in fine dust jacket: $50–$120
- Signed first edition: $200–$500
- Without jacket: $15–$30
- First Corgi paperback (2003): $3–$8
The highest-rated Discworld novel on most reader polls. Collectors prize it particularly in signed state, as Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2007 and his signed copies became increasingly scarce thereafter.