Later this year, a collection of 20 recently rediscover short stories by the late fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett will be released.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Sir Terry used the alias Patrick Kearns to pen the stories for a local newspaper.
Prior to now, they had not been credited to him, but now "a few devoted fans" have found them, according to Penguin publishers.
2015 saw the passing of Sir Terry, author of the bestselling Discworld books.
One of the longer tales in the new collection, The Quest for the Keys, had been framed and hanging on Pratchett fan Chris Lawrence's wall for 40 years.
He contacted the Pratchett estate about it, which led to fellow fans Pat and Jan Harkin discovering the others after searching through decades' worth of old newspapers.
The Quest for the Keys struck a chord with me when I was 15 years old, which is why I made the effort to gather each piece, according to Mr. Lawrence.
"For more than 35 years, I treasured and protected them. Despite having survived numerous house moves, I was unaware of their significance. I only realized how important they were after talking to Colin Smythe, the publisher of Pratchett. ".
"For all the years I was Terry's publisher and then agent, he never once helped me find any of his shorter writings, but as he wrote in his dedication to me in Dragons at Crumbling Castle, there were tales he had carefully hidden away," Smythe said.
I had no idea how accurate these words were. ".
Sir Terry published 70 books in his lifetime, which spanned 44 years and more than 70 million copies sold in 37 different languages.
Despite not taking place in the Discworld universe, the recently discovered stories "hint at the world Sir Terry would go on to create," according to Penguin.
According to the publisher, "readers can anticipate encountering characters ranging from cavemen to gnomes, wizards to ghosts, and reading about time travel tourism, the haunting of Council offices, and a visitor from another planet.".
A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories, a collection of the lost stories, will be released on October 5th.
However, other unpublished Pratchett works won't be released. As per the author's instructions, a steamroller crushed a hard drive in 2017 that contained up to 10 unfinished novels.
