A professor is missing — and not just any professor. The Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography. Also the University Librarian, who transmuted (you know how things change!) into an ape (a handy configuration for a librarian, don't you think) so long ago that no one exactly remembers his name, least of all himself.

But fear not, the search is on! The Lecturer in Recent Runes and the Chair of Indefinite Studies, as well as the Dean and the Archchancellor, will follow the trail wherever it leads — even to the other side of Discworld, where the Last Continent, Fourecks, is under construction.

Imagine a magical land as bald as a baby's bottom, where there are no trees; where rain is but a myth; where there are precious few animals (and few of them are precious). You have just imagined Fourecks (EcksEcksEcksEcks)* where even the ordinary is strange (the four legged duck, for example), as though evolution is being hurried up with the intention of sorting things out as soon as possible.

Experience the terror as the University's bold would-be rescuers encounter the cowardly Wizard Rincewind, a Mad Dwarf armed with a crossbow, Death, Death of Rats, and even a Creator of two.

Feel the passion as the bizarre denizens of the Last Continent learn what happens when rain falls out of the sky and rivers actually fill with water. (It utterly spoils regattas, for one thing.)

Thrill to the promise of next year's regatta, in remote, rustic Didjabringabeeralong. It'll be absolutely gujeroo.

Terry Pratchett lives and writes in England, where his vast popularity with readers of all ages has prompted critics to observe that his intricately eccentric and unfailingly amusing Discworld novels, arranged end to end, would extend all the way from one end of the arrangement to the other. He also has a hat.