Going Postal

Going Postal is a fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett, published in 2004 and the thirty-third Discworld book. It introduces Moist von Lipwig, a con man who escapes execution because the city's ruler wants someone to revive an institution nobody else will touch, and it is one of the few Discworld novels divided into chapters, each opening with a short passage of framing.

Lipwig is handed the Ankh-Morpork post office, which has been closed for years and still contains the mail of people long dead. He has to compete with the clacks, a semaphore network that carries messages faster and belongs to a man who will protect his business by any means, and he is supervised by a golem, whose literal reading of every instruction makes cheating difficult.

Pratchett uses the postal service to write about the value of a letter that actually arrives, and about what a monopolist does when a cheaper and more reliable alternative appears. The hero is a liar who discovers he enjoys being useful, and the book ends in a race to deliver a backlog that has been waiting for decades.