Lost in a Good Book

Thursday Next is back.  This Time, it's personal.
For Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, life should be good.  Riding high on a wave of celebrity following the safe return of kidnapped Jane Eyre, Thursday ties the knot with the man she loves.
  But marital bliss isn't quite as it should be.  It turns out her husband of one month actually drowned thirty-eight years ago, and no one but Thursday has any memory of him at all.
  Someone, somewhere is responsible.
  Having barely caught her breath after The Eyre Affair, Thursday heads back into fiction in search of the truth, discovering that paper politicians, lost Shakespearean manuscripts, a flurry of near-fatal coincidences and impending Armageddon are all part of a greater plan.
  But whose?  And why?


Lost in A Good Book is the second instalment of the Thursday Next series written by Jasper Fforde.  Lets get all the gushy stuff out of the way first.  I love the alternative Britain that Fforde has created. I love all the wacky literature references and the silly character names.  I love how Fforde plays around with the form of the text (conversations happening in the footnotes!), but most of all, I love Thursday.  Landen has disappeared but does she sit around and mope like any other heroine would?  No, she investigates!  Is this all Thursday gets up to in Lost in a Good Book?  No!  There's neanderthals, the Chesire Cat and even Miss Havisham.  Plus if you need a supernatural hit, like in the Eyre Affair, there is what I like to call the intermission moment where the main plot is put aside and Thursday goes off on an amusing adventure with SO-17 officer Spike Stoker. 
  Lost in A Good Book isn't always a barrel of laughs and the quieter thoughtful moments come from scenes with Thursday's parents and the Landen who now only exists in her memories, all adding a more detailed history for Thursday and the Next family.
  Sometimes I do get a bit lost with all the goings on in Thursday's world, and not all chapters captivated my imagination or even my attention.  However, there is still plenty to enjoy when reading Lost in a Good Book.  Although I'm not rushing to order the third book in the series, if The Well of Lost Plots happens to be in the library, I will be revisiting Thursday and Pickwick the dodo sometime next year.  

The Eyre Affair

This was another recommendation from a friend and I can't believe I hadn't heard of this series until earlier this year!


There is another 1985, where London's criminal gangs have moved into the lucrative literary market, and Thursday Next is on the trail of the new crime waves Mr Big.
Archeron Hades has been kidnapping characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom.  Jane Eyre is gone.  Missing.
Thursday sets out to find a way in the book to repair the damage.  But solving crimes against literature isn't easy when you also have to find time to halt the Crimean War, persuade the man you love to marry you, and figure out who really wrote Shakespeare's plays.
Perhaps today just isn't going to be Thursday's day.  Join her on a truly breathtaking adventure, and find out for yourself.  Fiction will never be the same again...


There is plenty to like about the Eyre affair: all the puns, the names, the dodos and how broad the spectrum for Thursday's world is.  Fforde has created a great female character who is completely no-nonsense and comes across as somewhat normal in a bizarre, off-kilter, version of 80's Britain.  Thursday is middle aged, of average looks, wants to progress in her career and struggles to forgive her ex-boyfriend for ratting out her brother.  There are plenty of  colourful characters introduced throughout the book, and some scenes that may be brought up later on in the series.  The Eyre affair reads like Robert Rankin at his nutty best; so much so that I kept wanting to dig out my copy of The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse.  I've got the second instalment, Lost in a Good Book, waiting in line to be read and I hope it is just as good as this fantastic introduction to the world of Thursday Next.