Next, please
Mystery- Fantasy & science fiction
- Humor
- Literary allusions
Thursday begins her career in The Eyre Affair, fighting a nefarious villain who kidnaps Jane Eyre right out of her book, forcing an abrupt ending in every existing copy. In order to set things aright, Thursday has to enter the novel and get personally involved with the plot and characters. This device proves so successful that in subsequent books she moves into the fictional world full-time, as an agent of JurisFiction, the policing agency of the fictional world. As a trainee in fiction, she is apprenticed to Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Havisham proves not only feisty, but pursues a longstanding rivalry with the Red Queen and is addicted to high speed motorcars and wont to getting into races with Mr. Toad.
You get the idea: books within books, etc. As the Fforde Ffan Club FfAQ says "there are a lot of jokes that play upon jokes that have played upon puns that travel from book to book". Suffice it to say that there is one laugh-aloud moment after another. The books are well-suited to anyone who enjoys mystery, SF and humor based on literature. Indeed, there are so many literary allusions, one never knows how much one is missing! You don't have to have read Jane Eyre, etc. to enjoy these books, but it helps.
These stories make you want to read others to find out what you're missing. Librarians, among others, should love these! Does anyone have a copy of Shadow the Sheepdog?
As of this writing, the novels involved are:
Thursday Next
- 1: The Eyre Affair
- 2: Lost In A Good Book
- 3: The Well Of Lost Plots
- 4: Something Rotten
- 5: First Among Sequels
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