Pyramids

Pyramids is a fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett, published in 1989 as the seventh Discworld book, and it won the BSFA Award for best novel that year. Its setting is Djelibeybi, the Disc's version of ancient Egypt: a kingdom founded seven thousand years earlier, now reduced to a strip of land along one river and governed in the name of a god.

Teppic is the son of the pharaoh and a recent graduate of the assassins' guild, which has given him an odd set of skills for a monarch. When his father dies he returns to rule, and finds that the high priest Dios has been running the kingdom so long that nothing has changed in millennia, including the enormous pyramid being built for the late king, which will shortly distort the shape of time around it.

Pratchett uses the setting to write about a country unable to move because its administration will not allow it, and the book ends with the world and the underworld arguing over which of them is real. It belongs to the earlier, more anarchic run of Discworld novels.