description: Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair puts 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
language: English
title: The Eyre Affair
titlecomplete: The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1)
characters: Edward Rochester, Emma, Lady Hamilton, Jane Eyre, Braxton Hicks, Pickwick, Acheron Hades, Wednesday Next, Mrs. Nakajima, Polly Next, Spike Stoker, Joffy Next, Thursday Next, Mycroft Next, Landen Parke-Laine, Jack Schitt, Thursday's Dad (name unknown)
genres: Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fantasy, Books About Books, Mystery, Time Travel, Adult, Fiction, Alternate History, Humor
ratings_count: 131119
places: England, Wales, Swindon, England
series: Thursday Next
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Locus Award
category: Best Science Fiction Novel, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Dilys Award, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: ALA Alex Award, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Lincoln Award
publisher: Hodder & Stoughton