Plot summary
Three months after the events of The Eyre Affair, Thursday Next is happily married to Landen Parke-Laine and working as a literary detective in Swindon. One day, Thursday meets her father, a renegade ChronoGuard, who informs her that the world's going to end in a flood of an unknown pink chemical. This is a result of one of her uncle Mycroft's inventions going out of control. Mycroft has destroyed his Prose Portal after the events of The Eyre Affair and retired, leaving the invention business in the hands of his two well-meaning but inept sons, Orville and Wilbur.
Thursday is sent with her partner, Bowden Cable, to the mansion of Lord Volescamper, a major supporter of the front-runner in the up-coming election for President. In his extensive library, they discover an original manuscript of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio . Tests done at the station determine its authenticity, and it seems to have appeared just in time to help its discoverer, Yorrick Kaine, to win the election (thanks to the "Shakespeare vote"). When he releases the play to the general public, victory is all but guaranteed.
Thursday had marooned Jack Schitt in Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven at the end of The Eyre Affair , and his employer, The Goliath Corporation, a Big Brother-like agency which is the de facto ruler of England, wants him back. They hire a ChronoGuard agent named Lavoisier to eradicate Thursday's husband Landen from the time line, as a hostage to blackmail Thursday into retrieving Schitt. Landen vanishes, and only Thursday remembers him. But she also has physical proof—she's pregnant with their child. Without Mycroft's Prose Portal, however, she'll have to learn a new way to travel between books.
During one of her dreams, she encounters Landen in her memory, who spurs her to travel to Osaka to meet Mrs. Nakajima, a woman who's learned how to travel through books. Mrs Nakajima introduces her to bookjumping, the method by which one enters the fictional world without the Prose Portal: those with an inherent talent for it can literally read themselves into the world of fiction and Thursday does so. It turns out that there is a police force within literature (both fiction and non-fiction), Jurisfiction, which employs both fictional characters and real people ranging from the Cheshire cat and the Red Queen to Ambrose Bierce and Voltaire, and ensures that literature continues in an orderly fashion. Next herself is apprenticed as a rookie Jurisfiction agent to Miss Havisham, the abandoned bride from Dickens' novel Great Expectations . Thursday is, however, in some legal trouble in the literary world for having changed the ending of Jane Eyre, in The Eyre Affair.
After a preliminary hearing in the Byzantine world of Kafka's The Trial and saving Abel Magwitch from drowning before the beginning of Great Expectations, Havisham and Thursday part ways and the latter character enters "The Raven" and retrieves Jack Schitt. But Goliath have no intention of keeping their word, and they trap Thursday in a Corporation warehouse without any reading material with which she can read herself out. Miss Havisham finds her there when it's discovered that the copy of Cardenio which Thursday found in the real world was stolen from the Great Library (a building where copies of every book ever written or conceived of are kept) by another literary character. Miss Havisham uses one of Thursday's clothing labels to read the pair (eventually and with great effort) back to the Great Library.
Guided through her dreams and memories by Landen, Thursday finds the event that caused the world-ending accident—or rather, the person: Aornis Hades, Acheron Hades' sister who wants revenge on Thursday for Acheron's death in The Eyre Affair. Aornis can edit people's memories so they don't remember her presence, which is why Thursday needed help from Landen to find Aornis in her own memory.
Cardenio is retrieved but Aornis escapes and now Goliath, the ChronoGuard, and SpecOps all seek to apprehend Thursday on Goliath's contrived charge of stealing corporate secrets. At the book's end, Aornis pressures Thursday to kill herself so that Aornis will prevent the world from turning into Dream Topping. Thursday's father takes her place in the nick of time and sacrifices himself as Mycroft's Dream Topping (see dream whip) making machine breaks down and begins producing the goo continuously; he takes all the Dream Topping to the dawn of Earth, where it—and he—will supply the organic nutrients needed to create life.
Afterwards, Thursday returns home and finds her father there. She is confused until she realizes that, being a time traveller, he will sacrifice himself much later in his future, even though it was just a little while ago in hers. Now that she is wanted by Goliath, the ChronoGuard, and Aornis, her father offers to place her in an alternate reality for a while (it is ironically implied that this is our reality) while she gives birth to Landen's baby. Refusing her father's offer, Thursday travels to a book in the Well of Lost Plots—a subdivision of the Great Library that contains unpublished and unfinished works—in order to take a year's maternity leave with her memory of Landen. She establishes a home in a moored flying boat (a Short Sunderland), after trading places with the plucky sidekick sergeant of a police procedural mystery; it is implied that this is Sergeant Mary Mary, from one of Fforde's other works, The Big Over Easy .
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.
Jasper Fforde is an English novelist whose first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. He is known mainly for his Thursday Next novels, but has also published two books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series, two in the Shades of Grey series and four in The Last Dragonslayer series. Fforde's books abound in literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots and playfulness with the conventional, traditional genres. They usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy.
In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document, monograph or section or chapter thereof. The epigraph may serve as a preface to the work; as a summary; as a counter-example; or as a link from the work to a wider literary canon, with the purpose of either inviting comparison or enlisting a conventional context.
The Eyre Affair is the debut novel by English author Jasper Fforde, published by Hodder and Stoughton in 2001. It takes place in an alternative 1985, where literary detective Thursday Next pursues a master criminal through the world of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Fforde had received 76 rejections for earlier works before being accepted by a publisher. Critical reception of this novel was generally positive, remarking on its originality.
The Well of Lost Plots is a novel by Jasper Fforde, published in 2003. It is the third book in the Thursday Next series, after The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
Thursday Next is the protagonist in a series of comic fantasy, alternate history mystery novels by the British author Jasper Fforde. She was introduced for the first time in Fforde's first published novel, The Eyre Affair, released on 19 July 2001 by Hodder & Stoughton. As of 2012, the series comprises seven books, in two series. The first series is made up of the novels The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten. The second series is so far made up of First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. As of November 2023, the next novel, Dark Reading Matter, is planned for 2025.
Something Rotten is the fourth book in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. It continues the story some two years after the point where The Well of Lost Plots leaves off.
The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde currently consists of the novels The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot.
The Big Over Easy is a 2005 novel written by Jasper Fforde. It features Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant, Sergeant Mary Mary.
Twilight is a 2005 young adult vampire-romance novel by author Stephenie Meyer. It is the first book in the Twilight series, and introduces seventeen-year-old Isabella "Bella" Swan, who moves from Phoenix, Arizona, to Forks, Washington. She is endangered after falling in love with Edward Cullen, a 103-year-old vampire frozen in his 17-year-old body. Additional novels in the series are New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn.
The Fourth Bear is a mystery/fantasy novel by Jasper Fforde published in July 2006. It is Jasper Fforde's sixth novel, and the second in the Nursery Crimes series. It continues the story of Detective Inspector Jack Spratt from The Big Over Easy.
Curtis Brown is a literary and talent agency based in London, UK. One of the oldest literary agencies in Europe, it was founded by Albert Curtis Brown in 1899. It is part of The Curtis Brown Group of companies.
First Among Sequels is an alternate history, comic fantasy novel by the British author Jasper Fforde. It is the fifth Thursday Next novel, first published on 5 July 2007 in the United Kingdom, and on 24 July 2007 in the United States. The novel follows the continuing adventures of Thursday Next in her fictional version of Swindon and in the BookWorld, and is the first of a new four-part Nextian series.
SpecOps is a fictional overarching British governmental force in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series of novels. It was established in 1928 to handle policing duties "too unusual or too specialized" to be handled by the regular police. The force and divisions are similar in name to the real world Specialist Operations of the Metropolitan Police Service. When introduced in The Eyre Affair, the divisions are described as "Below the Eight, Above the Law".
One of our Thursdays is Missing is the sixth Thursday Next book, by the British author Jasper Fforde. It was published in February 2011 in the United Kingdom and was published in March in the United States. The title is a reference to the 1942 war film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.
There is a large body of fiction set in an alternate history or a secret history, where the Operation Sea Lion, a German plan to invade Britain during World War II, is attempted or successfully carried out. However, analyses by experts during a wargame conducted in 1974 concluded that there was little chance of the plan succeeding.
The Woman Who Died A Lot is the seventh Thursday Next book, by the British author Jasper Fforde. It was published in July 2012; set in an alternative world where love of novels and plays is at the heart of modern society, it takes place in a fictional version of Swindon.
Love Letters is a young adult novel written by author Katie Fforde and was published by Arrow in 2009.
