This is what the cover of the book looks like—with all the tatters built into the design. At least, this is what my edition looks like, there are others.

The story is fresh and fun and especially entertaining to a writer. It’s about a woman named Thursday Next who is a detective—a Literatec—in a seemingly ordinary world.

Except, it’s not really ordinary. It’s an Alternate World—one where the Crimean War has been happening for 131 years, and where the characters have names like Paige Turner and Jack Schitt and Braxton Hicks. And where the ending to the novel Jane Eyre is one you have not read.

Thursday has an Uncle Mycroft who is an inventor. Once he invented a 2B pencil with a built-in spell-checker. Now he has Bookworms that have encoded within their DNA all the dictionaries of the English language. And thesauruses too. Or rather, thesauri. He calls them HyperBookworms.

With the help of the Bookworms, he creates a Prose Portal where his wife (Polly) gets stuck inside a Wordsworth poem. Meanwhile, an evil genius is stealing the great original manuscripts of the world, including Jane Eyre.

Jasper Fforde has an incredible imagination, a smooth writing style and a plot that sweeps you along. This is a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying read. To read a sample, go here.

So far, there are seven books in the Thursday Next series and they include: 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.

I’ll be moving on to the second book in the series now.

Have you read any of the Thursday Next series? Did you have fun?