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: #2292 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-19
• Original language: English
• 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

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

An unusually sure-footed first novel, this literary folly serves up a generally unique stew of fantasy, science fiction, procedural, and cozy literary mystery-but in the end is more dancing bear than ballet. In an alternative Britain where literature is as important to the masses as movie stars are in our own, kids trade bubble-gum cards of Fielding characters, Baconians go door to door like Jehovah's Witnesses preaching Francis Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare (while radical "New Marlovians" firebomb their meetings), and Richard III is weekly participatory theater, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Thursday Next, a veteran of the Crimean War (still being fought after a hundred years), is a LiteraTec, assigned to crimes such as stolen manuscripts and, because time travel is common, very convincing forgeries. Her father, a renegade ChronoGuard, travels time fighting historical revisionists, occasionally visiting Thursday to check his progress ("Have you ever heard of someone named Winston Churchill?"). Acheron Hades, whose supernatural powers make him the third most dangerous man in the world, steals the Prose Portal, an invention allowing travel between literature and reality, and the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit, then ransoms one of the minor characters. Things get worse when he gets his hands on Jane Eyre. Thursday pursues Acheron into the text of the novel (always a puzzlement to Bronte fans because of its oddly truncated close, in which Jane never returns to Rochester), defeats him, and gives the story its familiar happy ending. Back in her own world, Thursday marries her true love in scenes that parallel the novel she's just escaped, aided by characters she'd thought she'd left there. While endlessly inventive, the invention here displays more whim than whimsy (names like Jack Schitt, Millon de Floss, and Oswald Mandias get a grin, but no more), and the world this young Welsh newcomer creates lacks the integrity that makes the best fantasies both startling and enduring. Still, it's a welcoming and amusing place to pass a few hours. (Kirkus Reviews)

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

A LOT of fun...
Having read two of the Thursday Next books (and about to start my third), I'd just like to say that I agree with some of the points raised about characterisation being a little one-dimensional at times. However, I think that doesn't detract from the overall fun and flavour of the book(s) at all. I'm having a whale of a time in Jasper's world! The quirkiness is just right because there are enough real-world analogies to hang onto. Anyone know where I can get a re-engineered thylacine?

not quite as good as I thought it was going to be
I had a lot of hype from people about the book, and while I did enjoy it, I thought it was a little misnamed as the main plot of the book wasn't about Jane Eyre, but other books too - perhaps it was considered to be more attention grabbing that the Little Dorrit scandal or something.

Thursday was a little blank for me, perhaps because it was a male writer? And I wasn't convinced by the overwhelming love with her and her man, but perhaps that's an arc to be continued. I'd certainly get the next one, though and see how it went.

Some really funny bits, but a lot of loose ends, and not really enough explanation of how things were done.

Not as good as I expected
I really wanted to rave about this book, as its creative, innovative, unusual, witty and clever. But I found it hard to stick with and got bored; the story, plot and characters didn't grab me, and the style of writing began to irritate after a few pages. :(