Literary detective Thursday Next sleuths after book characters in an alternate reality of literature-obsessed England.
The Eyre Affair – A Thursday Next Novel (4/5 stars, currently priced at $7.99)
Publisher’s Weekly says:
This novel might be called “James Bond Meets Harry Potter in the Twilight Zone.” In fact, the reader plays “name that literary reference” through most of this zany work, where characters wander around in time from the Crimean War through the present and into the future, and in and out of novels including, of course, Jane Eyre. The narrator, Tuesday Next, is a tough, gun-totin’ heart-of-gold heroine with a pet dodo, a true love she has refused to acknowledge and a brilliant, dotty scientist uncle named Mycroft.
Her job is to rescue literary characters kidnapped out of books from being wiped off the face of every copy of a work by tracking down and outwitting the purely evil Asheron Hades and Goliath Corporation greedyman Jack Shit. Throughout, discussions of who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays abound, along with send-ups of every literary genre from the highest to the lowest brow. Sastre’s reading works particularly well because she’s good at the straight narrative, while the nature of the book’s language makes melodramatic voices for the other bizarre characters.
Lost In A Good Book – A Thursday Next Novel (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $11.99)
The second installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series.
The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with New York Times bestselling author Jasper Fforde’s magnificent second adventure starring the resourceful, fearless literary sleuth Thursday Next.
When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction—the police force inside the BookWorld. She is apprenticed to the man-hating Miss Havisham from Dickens’s Great Expectations, who grudgingly shows Thursday the ropes. And she gains just enough skill to get herself in a real mess entering the pages of Poe’s “The Raven.” What she really wants is to get Landen back. But this latest mission is not without further complications.
Along with jumping into the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself the target of a series of potentially lethal coincidences, the authenticator of a newly discovered play by the Bard himself, and the only one who can prevent an unidentifiable pink sludge from engulfing all life on Earth. It’s another genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment for fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse.
The Well Of Lost Plots – A Thursday Next Novel (4/5 stars, currently priced at $11.99)
The third installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series.
Jasper Fforde has done it again in this genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment.
After two rollicking New York Times bestselling adventures through Western literature, resourceful BookWorld literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside?
But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books—like the one she has taken up residence in—are scrapped for salvage.
To make matters worse, a murderer is stalking the personnel of Jurisfiction and it’s up to Thursday to save the day.
Something Rotten – A Thursday Next Novel (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $7.99)
The fourth installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series.
The popularity of Jasper Fforde’s one-of-a-kind series of genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment builds with each new book.
Now in the fourth installment, the resourceful literary detective Thursday Next returns to Swindon from the BookWorld accompanied by her son Friday and none other than the dithering Hamlet. But returning to SpecOps is no snap—as outlaw fictioner Yorrick Kaine plots for absolute power, the return of Swindon’s patron saint foretells doom, and, if that isn’t bad enough, The Merry Wives of Windsor is becoming entangled with Hamlet.
Can Thursday find a Shakespeare clone to stop this hostile takeover? Can she vanquish Kaine and prevent the world from plunging into war? And will she ever find reliable child care? Find out in this totally original, action-packed romp, sure to be another escapist thrill for Jasper Fforde’s legions of fans.
Click here to browse the full Thursday Next series.
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