Rating: Can’t get enough of it!
Genre: metafiction, parody, fantasy

This ingenious novel features a literary detective called Thursday Next. A literary detective, or LiteraTec, is actually a detective who deals with solving puzzles/crimes related to books. Their workscope includes:
- analysing manuscripts to verify their authenticity (they do it in super interesting and imaginative ways, such as feeding the text into this machine, which analyses all the word use, punctuation, sentence construction and so on… and compares it to a set ‘control’…)
- doing investigations into curious incidents of ‘escaped’ characters from novels
In this novel, Thursday comes up against Acheron Hades (this big baddie with such scary mythical powers and ability - think Voldemort), Acheron has stolen the manuscripts Chuzzlewit and Jane Eyre, and kidnapped Mycroft, Thursday’s uncle. Mycroft has invented a special machine which opens portals into books, allowing outsiders to enter the world… think escapism (via reading). It’s really cool actually… I would dearly love to enter quite a few novels! Think of the sights I would be able to see! The fantastic creatures! The magic… wouldn’t you just love to step into Hogwarts? Or visit Verona? Or take part in the exciting trail of Dracula? Or perhaps, even, have a tour of utopia?

The book also discusses the possibility of whether Shakespeare really wrote his plays? Or was it Francis Bacon? Marlowe? This part of the mystery is solved by Thursday’s father, also a member of the SpecOps, until he turned ‘rogue’. He’s in the chronoguard, a special force which is able to jump around in time, mend Patches of Bad Time (think a hole in the sky, like in ‘Chicken Little’, enlarging, and influencing the area rite under it such that time slows down to a crawl in there… ) It’s such an interesting concept though. It’s hard to explain.

It’s a book about books. And nothing but books, characters from books, extinct creatures… There’s no mention of the television, radio, cosmetics, clothes, u know… all the frivolous things we shop for? It’s like everything that matters in the book is the literary word. I really enjoyed the book, and marvelled at Fforde’s creativity. His imagination has no boundaries! Fantastic!

Other books by Jasper Fforde:
The Thursday Next series: The Eyre Affair (2001), Lost in a Good Book (2002), The Well of Lost Plots (2003), Something Rotten (2004)
The Nursery Criems series: The Big Easy over Money (2005), The Fourth Bear (July 2006)

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