Thief of Time characters

Appears from the start

The granddaughter of Death, who has inherited a measure of his uncanny abilities but wants nothing more than an ordinary life. Brisk, rational, and impatient with nonsense, she works as a schoolteacher and keeps her strange heritage firmly in check. When a threat to the whole world requires someone who can act outside the normal flow of time, she is reluctantly drawn back into her grandfather's affairs.

Appears from the start

The anthropomorphic personification of Death: a towering skeletal figure in a black robe who speaks in a hollow, resonant voice and harbours an odd, persistent fondness for humanity. Susan's grandfather, he perceives a catastrophe gathering that endangers all living things and sets about rallying help to meet it.

Also known as The Sweeper

Appears from the start

An unassuming elderly sweeper at a remote mountain monastery, who is in truth a legendary History Monk, a member of a secretive order that keeps time and history running as they should. Modest, sly, and endlessly patient, he favours cunning over force and lives by the homely sayings of a washerwoman whose wisdom he reveres.

Appears from the start

A gifted and cocky young novice at the mountain monastery, formerly a thief on the streets of Ankh-Morpork, who displays an uncanny natural talent for the monks' time-bending arts. Quick, arrogant, and unusually skilled, he is taken on as the sweeper Lu-Tze's personal apprentice.

Appears from the start

A meticulous, obsessive young clockmaker in Ankh-Morpork, so consumed by precision that he takes regular medicine to keep himself calm and balanced. His single passion is accuracy, and he is commissioned by a mysterious wealthy client to build the most perfectly accurate clock ever made.

Also known as Myria LeJean

Appears from the start

A strange, immensely wealthy woman with oddly formal, over-precise manners, who approaches the clockmaker Jeremy and commissions the perfect glass clock, sparing no expense. There is something not quite ordinary about the way she carries herself and speaks.

Appears from the start

Faceless, impersonal entities that oversee the orderly working of the universe and despise the messiness, unpredictability, and individuality of living things. They regard life, and humanity above all, as an intolerable disruption to the tidy machinery of existence, and would prefer it stopped.

Appears from the start

The head of the History Monks' mountain monastery, an ancient soul who is continually reborn and therefore currently inhabits the body of an infant while retaining centuries of accumulated wisdom, to the frequent difficulty of everyone who must deal with him.