The Eyre Affair

List Price: $14.00

Save 10.0%

You Pay: $12.60

Want this eBook?Our eBook Library Software is required to purchase and download eBooks. Download it here.

Tell a Friend

Overview

"The first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next-a New York Times bestseller!In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Bront?'s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel-unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix."

Editorial Reviews

"[Thursday Next is] part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"Neatly delivers alternate history, Monty Pythonesque comedy skits, Grand Guignol supervillains, thwarted lovers, po-mo intertextuality, political commentary, time travel, vampires, absent-minded inventors, a hard-boiled narrator, and lots, lots more.... Suspend your disbelief, find a quiet corner and just surrender to the storytelling voice of the unstoppable, ever-resourceful Thursday Next." -The Washington Post"Fforde's imaginative novel will satiate readers looking for a Harry Potter-esque tale.... The Eyre Affair's literary wonderland recalls Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers series, the works of Lewis Carroll and Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode." -USA Today"Filled with clever wordplay, literary allusion and bibliowit, The Eyre Affair combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but its quirky charm is all its own." -The Wall Street Journal"Jasper Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, is a spirited sendup of genre fiction-it's part hardboiled mystery, part time-machine caper-that features a sassy, well-read 'Special Operative in literary detection' named Thursday Next, who will put you more in mind of Bridget Jones than Miss Marple. Fforde delivers almost every sentence with a sly wink, and he's got an easy way with wordplay, trivia, and inside jokes.... Fforde's verve is rarely less than infectious." -The New York Times Book Review"[Fforde] delivers multiple plot twists, rampant literary references and streams of wild metafictional invention in a novel that places literature at the center of the pop-cultural universe.... It all adds up to a brainy, cheerfully twisted adventure." -Time Out New York"[The Eyre Affair] is a blend of suspense and silliness, two parts fantasy (think Alice in Wonderland meets Superman), two parts absurdity (think Carl Hiaasen) and one part mystery (Agatha Christie meets Sue Grafton)." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde traded a varied career in the film industry for staring vacantly out of the window and arranging words on a page. He lives and writes in Wales. The Eyre Affair was his first novel in the bestselling Thursday Next series. The Big Over Easy is the first in his new Nursery Crime series.

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin

Filesize

663.27 KB

Number of Pages

384

eBook ISBN

9780786574643

Awards

  • Alex Awards
  • Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
  • Dilys Award
  • Listen Up Awards
  • School Library Journal Best Books of the Year

Excerpt from: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde


The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde - Author
$14.00
add to cart view cart


Book: Paperback | 5.15 x 7.79in | 384 pages | ISBN 9780142001806 | 25 Feb 2003 | Penguin
Click here for other formats

The Eyre Affair


The first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Nextýa New York Times bestseller!

In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontý's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasyýenhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novelýunites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.

A Woman Named Thursday Next

". . . The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. "If you want to be a SpecOp," the saying goes, "act kinda weird . . ."

MILLION DE FLOSS
-A Short History of the Special Operations Network