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He left behind three completed novels: the final Discworld book, The Shepherd’s Crown, and the last two volumes of the science fiction series he had been writing with Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth.

Most are a few pages long, riffing briefly on one or other ludicrous situation – comical cave people, a haunted steamroller, a hundred-yard pie, UFO aliens on holiday mistaken for invaders.

The better of these, Wanted: A Fat Jolly Man with a Red Woolly Hat, contains the story germ of the marvellous Mort, the 1987 Discworld novel in which Death resigns his position.

The Fossil Beach starts from the premise that putting a fossilised seashell to your ear enables you to hear a prehistoric ocean, spinning a neat and funny little time-travel comedy from that notion.

It opens in “Morpork” – not exactly the Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork, but a more thinly rendered “evil, ancient, foggy city” – where a disreputable wizard, Grubble the Utterly Untrustworthy, sends the none-too-bright warrior Kron on the titular quest.

He likens them in style and vibe to Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm tales, “knowing and accessible for children with raisins of wit tossed in for adults”.

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