Good Omens

A comedy about the end of the world that lands a joke on nearly every page and still plants its clues with care, so the late payoffs feel earned. Pratchett and Gaiman treat angels, demons and a witch’s prophecies with a light touch rather than solemnity. Some readers see the ending coming, but those who like humour with real craft underneath will be well served.

Worth knowing Good Omens, from 1990, is the one novel Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman wrote together, by phone and floppy disk, and neither could later say who wrote which line. The Antichrist is born and, through a mix-up at a convent of Satanic nuns, grows up as Adam Young in a Oxfordshire village, entirely unsupervised by Hell; the angel Aziraphale, who runs a bookshop, and the demon Crowley, who drives a Bentley, have both got used to Earth over six thousand years and would rather Armageddon, due on a Saturday, did not happen. Agnes Nutter’s seventeenth-century prophecies, all accurate and none useful, provide the plot. The Amazon series of 2019 with Michael Sheen and David Tennant followed the book closely; its second season of 2023 went beyond it.

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