Book:The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

Book:The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
Cover art for Book:The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
Co-author(s)	{{{coauthors}}}
Illustrator(s)	David Wyatt
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	1st November 2001
ISBN	0385601239
Pages	272
RRP	£12.99
Main characters	Maurice, Rats, Keith the Piper, Malicia Grim
Series	[[:Category:{{{series}}}|{{{series}}}]]
Annotations	View
Notes	Book #28
All data relates to the first UK edition.

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is the 28th book in the Discworld series, and the first for young readers. It was released in a smaller hardback format than the previous Discworld novels, a format which was used up to and including A Hat Full of Sky.

Blurb

Imagine a million clever rats.

Rats that don't run.

Rats that fight...

Maurice, a streetwise tomcat, has the perfect money-making scam. He's found a stupid-looking kid who plays a pipe, and he has his very own plague of rats – rats who are strangely educated, so Maurice can no longer think of them as 'lunch'. And everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers...

But when they reach the stricken town of Bad Blintz, the little con suddenly goes down the drain. For someone there is playing a different tune. A dark, shadowy tune. Something very, very bad is waiting in the cellars.

The educated rats must learn a new word.

EVIL.

It's not a game any more. It's a rat-eat-rat world down there. And that might only be the start...

Terry Pratchett leads readers from tale to tail in a darkly imaginative and fiendishly entertaining story, the first for young readers set in the Discworld universe.

Characters

• Maurice
• The Clan
  • Additives
  • Dangerous Beans
  • Darktan
  • Hamnpork
  • Nourishing
  • Peaches
  • Sardines
• Keith the Piper
• Malicia Grim
• Spider, a Rat King
• Death of Rats
• Ron Blunkett
• Billy Spears

Adaptations

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a 90-minute dramatisation in 2003, which was repeated on BBC 7 on June 2, 2007 and April 27, 2008. The character of Dangerous Beans was voiced by David Tennant. Darktan's voice was a spoof version of Sean Connery's Scottish burr. The narrator in the adaptation was Maurice himself, describing to Dangerous Beans how they arrived at the perilous situation near the end of the plot. Quotes from Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure, which appear as chapter heads in the book, were read by the character Peaches. To mark the occasion of Terry Pratchett's knighthood, it was broadcast on BBC 7 again, along with other dramatizations of his work, in February 2009.

External links

• The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents on the Annotated Pratchett File

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