Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1591 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-19
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

The Times
'The reader is catapulted in and out of truth and imagination on a hectic, humorous and neatly constructed chase'

Review
'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 )

Customer Reviews

Who you gotta call? - Thursday Next!
My friend bought me 'The Eyre Affair' at the end of last year and I admit I was somewhat cautious about reading, I did not think I would enjoy it, well I was totally WRONG!, I read it in 2 days and enjoyed it immensely.

Thursday Next is a great character, she does not hide her flaws, finds herself in situations that are slightly bizarre while worrying about her love life and the state of her hair. A laugh out loud book. I am officially hooked and I am currently reading 'Something Rotten', the 4th book in the series.

Love this book!
What an amazing book! Brilliant, original idea, well played out - it had me panting for the next one in the series. There should be a law passed obliging Jasper fforde to write at least one Thursday Next book a year.

Over-long one-joke book
...which Woody Allen did better in "The Kugelmass Episode", a short story in his collection "Side Effects".

Not too terrible, though it dragged in places. I won't rush to read any more Fforde, though I might pick it up if there was nothing else around.