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Going Postal

Synopsis
Moist von Lipwig, con artist and all-around fraud, unexpectedly finds that instead of faking his own death to escape the law, someone has faked his death for him. Unfortunately, that someone was Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and now Lipwig has a choice: either he gets hanged for real, or he tries to get the Ankh-Morpork Postal Service up and running as its new Postmaster General. With great reluctance, Lipwig takes the job, only to find things are even worse than he imagines, as he encounters ghosts, golems, a few angry men from the Grand Trunk clacks line who want him dead, centuries' worth of dead letters, and the love of his life: Adora Belle Dearheart, a golem-rights activist who's tougher than her name implies.

Going Postal, as a Discworld novel, is filled with references and parodies — here the references include GNU, crackers, AT&T, and The Smoking Gun. A critique of libertarianism is also a theme in the book, dovetailing with an extended parody of Atlas Shrugged and more generally the works of Ayn Rand.