Mr. William de Worde has never cared much for his family’s traditions, which typically include privileged and arrogant behaviour as well as a foolhardy death in some stupid war. No. Instead, Mr. de Worde likes words. As the black sheep of his family, William has settled in Ankh-Morpork, where he edits a regular letter detailing local events for its few wealthy subscribers. The subscribers must be wealthy because engraving the wooden block needed to duplicate the letter is slow and expensive, and because the letter appears relatively infrequently.

Then one day, dwarfs arrive in the city and introduce a device that can duplicate texts endlessly with small movable metal type, even as the text is being dictated, as long as there is enough paper and ink. This crashes the prices of printing work, and suddenly William de Worde finds himself drifting into the role of editor-in-chief of Ankh-Morpork’s first newspaper, the News. The newspaper is sold for pennies instead of dollars, so almost everyone can afford it, and the influx of money cannot be stopped. This naturally angers the Engravers' Guild, which quickly adds Printing to its field and begins predatory pricing to drive the Ankh-Morpork News out of business with an even cheaper paper – whose news is, of course, made up, but does the truth ultimately matter?

De Worde thinks it does, and he begins to investigate why it looks like the city’s Patrician, Lord Vetinari, has murdered his servant. In this context, de Worde gets acquainted with, for example, the New Firm: a gang of two professional killers, where Mr. Pin is small but mean while Mr. Tulip is big but rabid. Additionally, because Ankh-Morpork is a multicultural city, we also run into a zombie lawyer and a vampire photographer who has taken a pledge of temperance and no longer drinks the liquid starting with “b”, but instead channels his passion into his profession.

Even though The Truth was published back in 2000, it feels very timely in this “post-truth era”. Despite its uncomfortable closeness to reality, I still laughed out loud a few times with this Pratchett book too. And although this is indeed already the 25th book in the Discworld series, it is a completely standalone work and does not require reading any other installment.