The Bromeliad Trilogy

About The Bromeliad Trilogy

Also known as the Nome Trilogy, this children's fantasy series follows the Nomes -- a race of tiny people, only a few inches tall, who have lived hidden inside a department store for a decade believing it to be the entire universe. Truckers (1989) begins when the store's imminent demolition forces the Nomes to make contact with the small band of 'Outside' Nomes who have survived in the wild, and to stage a desperate, resourceful escape aboard a stolen truck. It's Pratchett at his most inventive with scale, imagining human infrastructure entirely from a few-inches-tall perspective.

Diggers and Wings follow the Nomes as they try to build a new life in a working quarry and then discover, to the shock of the whole community, that their ancestors came from outer space -- setting up a plan to return there. As with much of Pratchett's early work, the trilogy balances broad comedy with real philosophical undercurrents about faith, technology, and how a small society decides what's true about a world too big for it to fully perceive.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Truckers, Diggers, Wings. It's a single continuous story following the same group of Nomes across all three books, published within about eighteen months of each other and meant to be read straight through. No Discworld knowledge is needed -- it's an entirely separate setting, aimed at a slightly younger readership.