Clara’s Verdict
Give me a production that treats a comic masterpiece with this much care and I will forgive it almost anything; happily, there is nothing here to forgive. Wyrd Sisters catches Terry Pratchett hitting his full stride, taking the furniture of Shakespearean tragedy, the witches, the murdered king, the usurping cousin, the missing heir, and rearranging it into something gloriously his own. Penguin’s audio edition rises to meet him: Indira Varma leads the telling, Bill Nighy takes the footnotes, and Peter Serafinowicz arrives as the voice of Death.
The honest caveat is a small one. Pratchett’s comedy runs on puns, digressions and footnotes that sprout footnotes of their own, and if that style has never worked for you, this entry will not stage a conversion. For everyone else, here are just under ten hours of sharp, humane, endlessly quotable fantasy, and one of the most inviting doorways into the Discworld I can point you towards.
About the Audiobook
This is the sixth Discworld novel and the second in the Witches strand, though the series is built so you can listen in any order without penalty. The set-up is pure theatre: three witches gathered on a lonely heath, a king cruelly murdered, his throne usurped by an ambitious cousin, and a child heir and the royal crown both missing. Witches, we are assured, do not suffer leadership problems of this kind, because witches do not have leaders. Granny Weatherwax merely happens to be the most highly regarded of the leaders they do not have.
What follows is a tangle of royal politics, destiny and blood that stubbornly will not wash off, as Granny discovers that meddling in the affairs of kingdoms is rather more complicated than certain playwrights would have you believe. Beneath the comedy sits one of Pratchett’s favourite arguments: destiny matters, but people go wrong when they think it controls them, when the truth runs the other way around. The edition closes with an afterword by Joanne Harris, and it belongs to a catalogue that has now sold over a million Discworld audiobooks, which tells you how naturally this world takes to the ear.
The Narration
Indira Varma, familiar from Game of Thrones, Luther and This Way Up, leads the performance across 9 hours and 53 minutes, and she is a splendid fit for the witches. The material needs a narrator who can play wry intelligence and theatrical menace in the same breath, and Varma moves between cottage and castle without dropping a stitch. The supporting arrangement is the production’s masterstroke: Bill Nighy, a BAFTA and Golden Globe winning actor, reads the footnotes, so Pratchett’s asides land like a mischievous voice leaning in from the wings, while Peter Serafinowicz gives the voice of Death exactly the right sepulchral deadpan.
A new theme tune composed by James Hannigan completes an edition with proper theatrical furniture. At just under ten hours this is one of the brisker Discworld listens, easily despatched across a week of commutes, and the pacing never lets the jokes queue-jump the story; the plot keeps moving even while the footnotes are having fun.
What Readers Say
The rating stands at 4.6 stars from 12 listeners, and the affection running through the comments is unmistakable. One returning fan, revisiting the story three decades after first meeting it, found it even better the second time around, reflecting that Pratchett’s characters are stitched so richly into the Disc that you end up laughing alongside them rather than at their expense, because each reflects something of ourselves back at us. Another summed up the pleasures as witches, royalty and murder wrapped around a play staged inside the story, tipping its hat to Shakespeare while merrily sending him up, with Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and young Magrat Garlick meddling in kingdom affairs they would insist are none of their business; the same listener filed it among the books worth returning to again and again.
A more measured four-star comment recommended it as the perfect remedy for anyone who once had to dissect Shakespeare at school, since Pratchett has done the dissection himself and reassembled the pieces in a far more entertaining order, and judged the writing a clear step up from the earliest books in the sequence. The shortest response may be the truest: Pratchett simply does not let you down, and the witches remain the favourites.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone curious about Discworld can start here with complete confidence; the series rewards any point of entry, and this story stands happily on its own. It is a gift for fantasy listeners who like the genre affectionately dismantled, for anyone who sat through Macbeth at school wishing somebody would ask the witches for their version, and for comedy fans who want jokes built on craft rather than volume. Established Pratchett devotees will want this edition for the casting alone; hearing the footnotes given their own voice is a small, perfect indulgence. Save it for later only if you are wedded to strict publication order, and even then, do not save it too long.
To meet the most highly regarded leader the witches emphatically do not have, listen to Wyrd Sisters free with an Audible trial and let the Disc work on you.
