The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next) [Paperback]

Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.

Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney

'What Fforde is pulling is a variation on the classic Monty Python gambit: the incongruous juxtaposition og low comedy and high erudition - this scam has not been pulled off with such off-hand finesse and manic verve since the Pythons shut up shop. 'The Eyre Affair' is a silly book for smart people: postmodernism played as raw, howling farce' -- Independent 'It is always a privilege to watch the birth of a cult, and Hodder has just cut the umbilical cord. Always ridiculous, often hilarious ... blink and you miss a vital narrative leap. There are shades of Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, 'Clockwork Orange' and '1984'. And that's just for starters' -- Time Out 'Ingenious - I'll watch Jasper Fforde nervously' -- Terry Pratchett 'Surely a cult in the making' -- Marie Clare

'What Fforde is pulling is a variation on the classic Monty Python gambit: the incongruous juxtaposition og low comedy and high erudition - this scam has not been pulled off with such off-hand finesse and manic verve since the Pythons shut up shop. 'The Eyre Affair' is a silly book for smart people: postmodernism played as raw, howling farce' (Independent )

'It is always a privilege to watch the birth of a cult, and Hodder has just cut the umbilical cord. Always ridiculous, often hilarious ... blink and you miss a vital narrative leap. There are shades of Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, 'Clockwork Orange' and '1984'. And that's just for starters' (Time Out )

'Ingenious - I'll watch Jasper Fforde nervously' (Terry Pratchett )

'Surely a cult in the making' (Marie Clare )

'The eccentric epic - A read that'll leave you breathless'

'Ingenious - I'll watch Jasper Fforde nervously'

'A decidedly quirky and strangely thought-provoking debut novel'

'Surely a cult in the making'

'Surely a cult in the making'

There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where the Crimean war still rages, dodos are regenerated in home-cloning kits and everyone is deeply disappointed by the ending of 'Jane Eyre'. In this world there are no jet-liners or computers, but there are policemen who can travel across time, a Welsh republic, a great interest in all things literary - and a woman called Thursday Next.

In this utterly original and wonderfully funny first novel, Fforde has created a fiesty, loveable heroine and a plot of such richness and ingenuity that it will take your breath away.

An extraordinary, breathtaking and ingenious joy of a book
'The Eyre Affair' is unlike any novel I have encountered before, and it deserves to be read, and loved by a great number of people.

Imagine if Lewis Carroll had decided to write a detective story, which became a love story, which grew into a thriller, which ended up as an astonishing, highly entertaining page-turner that confounds expectations, and you have some idea of the scope of this novel.

Jasper Fforde has created a world not so very different to our own, where his wonderful, loveable heroine Thursday Next struggles to defend literary figures from kidnapping, and sometimes worse. The cast of characters that aid and abet her is fantastic (including Wordsworth, Jack Schitt of the Goliath corporation, Welsh booksellers, vampire-stakers, time-travellers and Jane Eyre's own Mr Rochester), and the writing is exuberant.

This is a book that must be read to be believed. Try it, and let yourself in for a treat. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Welcome to the inside of my head. Apart from a few panicked memories about getting lost in a department store aged five, my imagination is a pleasant enough place to be - if you’re me. If you’re not me then you can do the next best thing and order up 'The Eyre Affair’ and have a read. There should be something to appeal to most readers as the plot visits, at one time or another, most genres - thriller, crime, romance, humour, sci-fi, literary - a veritable Swiss army knife in fact; if you don’t like a subplot then wait awhile - another is sure to pop up soon. Over here at the Fforde Ffiction Ffactory we have many more novels bubbling away in our cauldron as well as a Thursday Next website and much else besides.

But for now I wish you health and happiness - and trust you have as much fun reading 'The Eyre Affair’ as I did writing it.

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde's first novel was publishing to astonishing critical and commercial success in 2001. Since then he has written 3 other Thursday next novels, and is working on the first in a new series of crime novels. Jasper lives near Hay-on-Wye and flies Tiger Moth aeroplanes as relaxation.

My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultra-slow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was. Dad had remained at liberty ever since; we learned from his subsequent visits that he regarded the whole service as 'morally and historically corrupt' and was fighting a one-man war against the bureaucrats within the Office for Special Temporal Stability. I didn't know what he meant by that and still don't; I just hoped he knew what he was doing and didn't come to any harm doing it. His skills at stopping the clock were hard-earned and irreversible: he was now a lonely i! tinerate in time, belonging to not one age but to all of them and having no home other than the chronoclastic ether. I wasn't a member of the ChronoGuard. I never wanted to be. By all accounts it's not a huge barrel of laughs, although the pay is good and the service boasts a retirement plan that is second to none: a one-way ticket to anywhere and anywhen you want. No, that wasn't for me. I was what we called an 'Operative Grade I' for SO-27, the Literary Detective Division of the Special Operations Network based in London. It's way less flash than it sounds. Since 1980 the big criminal gangs had moved in on the lucrative literary market and we had much to do and few funds to do it with. I worked under Area Chief Boswell, a small, puffy man who looked like a bag of flour with arms and legs. He lived and breathed the job; words were his life and his love _ he never seemed happier than when he was on the trail of a counterfeit Coleridge or a fake Fielding. It was under Boswell that we arrested the gang who were stealing and selling Samuel Johnson first editions; on another occasion we uncovere! d an attempt to authenticate a flagrantly unrealistic version of Shakespeare's lost work, Cardenio. Fun while it lasted, but only small islands of excitement among the ocean of day-to-day mundanities that is SO-27: we spent most of our time dealing with illegal traders, copyright infringements and fraud. I had been with Boswell and SO-27 for eight years, living in a Maida Vale apartment with Pickwick, a regenerated pet dodo left over from the days when reverse extinction was all the rage and you could buy home cloning kits over the counter. I was keen - no, I was desperate - to get away from the LiteraTecs but transfers were unheard of and promotion a non-starter. The only way I was going to make full Inspector was if my immediate superior moved on or out. But it never happened; Inspector Turner's hope to marry a wealthy Mr Right and leave the service stayed just that - a hope - as so often Mr Right turned out to be either Mr Liar, Mr Drunk or Mr Already Married. As I said earlier, my father had a face that could stop a clock; and that's exactly what happened one spring morning as I was having a sandwich in a small cafe not far from work. The world flickered, shuddered and stopped. The proprietor of the cafe froze in mid-sentence and the picture on the television stopped dead. Outside, birds hung motionless in the sky. Cars and trams halted in the streets and a cyclist involved in an accident stopped in midair, the look of fear frozen on his face as he paused two feet from the hard asphalt. The sound halted too, replaced by a dull snapshot of a hum, the world's noise at that moment in time paused indefinitely at the same pitch and volume. 'How's my gorgeous daughter?' I turned. My father was sitting at a table and rose to hug me affectionately. 'I'm good,' I replied, returning his hug tightly. 'How's my favourite father?' 'Can't complain. Time is a fine physician.' I stared at him for a moment. 'Y'know,' I muttered, 'I think you're looking younger every time I see you.' 'I am. Any grandchildren in the offing?' 'The way I'm going? Not ever.' My father smiled and raised an eyebrow. 'I wouldn't say that quite yet.' He handed me a Woolworths bag. 'I was in '78 recently,' he announced. 'I brought you this.' He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognise the title. 'Didn't they split in '70?' 'Not always. How are things?'