The Well of Lost Plots (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Jasper Fforde manages to successfully weave together a quick course in A-level English, purely bizarre fantasy, a cast of fascinating characters, a fair amount of action adventure, a little love and loss and a generous amount of warm humour. He is an excellent story teller and I, as a reader, am delighted to bound along after him as he takes his plots to deliciously surreal heights.

I wouldn't know where to start in describing the plot so I would recommend readers to simply find out for themselves. I defy anybody to fail to find pleasure in a book which features a tame dodo who eats marshmallows and goes "plock".

While the first 2 books were set mainly in the real world with occasional visits into various classic novels, this one takes place almost exclusively within books and the result is a breathtaking expansion of what was already a superb creation.

Thursday Next, heroine of the first two books is hiding out from the evil Goliath Corporation, among other enemies, inside The Well of Lost Plots. To be specific, she's hiding out in a dreary crime thriller called Caversham Heights where she takes over a role of Mary in the story as part of the Character Exchange Programme. The Well of Lost Plots is where all of those books that are still being written are kept, along with a wealth of plot devices, characters both good and evil who are waiting to be used and members of Jurisfiction who rule on problems within books and who generally maintain order.

Thursday encounters various dangers while working as a Jurisfiction apprentice including a dangerous flock of grammasites, verbisoides in this instance, who attack and consume any stray verbs they could find. She also has terrible problems with a mispeling vyrus that threatens to reduce the story and it's characters to an unrecognisable shambles. But there is also a murderer in their midst and it's left to Thursday to work out who the murderer is and why the victims were killed.

This really is an incredibly imaginative and entertaining book that expands Fforde's BookWorld to unbelievable proportions. It's left me fervently hoping that there are more Thursday Next stories still to come.