ISBN: 9780142001806

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. Fforde's ingenious fantasy?enhanced by a W… More...

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. 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. The Nile on eBay   FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE   The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde The &quot;New York Times&quot; bestseller is the first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative. FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description In Jasper Fforde&#039;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 Bronte&#039;s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde&#039;s ingenious fantasy&mdash;enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel&mdash;unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.Read Jasper Fforde&#039;s posts in the Penguin Blog Author Biography JASPER FFORDE, the?author of the best-selling?Thursday Next mysteries and the Nursery Crime books, has a devoted worldwide fan base for his entertaining and original novels. He lives with his family in Wales. --> Table of Contents 1. A Woman Named Thursday Next 2. Gad's Hill 3. Back at My Desk 4. Acheron Hades 5. Search for the Guilty, Punish the Innocent 6. Jane Eyre: A Short Excursion in the Novel 7. The Goliath Corporation 8. Airship to Swimdon 9. The Next Family 10. The Finis Hotel, Swindon 11. Polly Flashes Upon the Inward Eye 12. SpecOps-27: The Literary Detectives 13. The Church at Capel-y-ffin 14. Lunch with Bowden 15. Hello and Goodbye, Mr. Quaverley 16. Sturmey Archer and Felix7 17. SpecOps-17: Suckers and Biters 18. Landen Again 19. The Very Irrev. Joffy Next 20. Dr. Runcible Spoon>br> 21. Hades and Goliath 22. The Waiting Game 23. The Drop 24. Martin Chuzzlewit Is Reprieved 25. Time Enough for Contemplation 26. The Earthcrossers 27. Hades Finds Another Manuscript 28. Haworth House 29. Jane Eyre 30. A Groundwell of Popular Feeling 31. The People's Republic of Wales 32. Thornfield Hall 33. The Book Is Written 34. Nearly the End of Their Book 35. Nearly the End of Our Book 36. Married Review Quote "[Thursday Next is] part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry." Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide INTRODUCTION TO THE EYRE AFFAIR Masterpiece Theatre meets James Bond in The Eyre Affair , the first novel in Jasper Fforde''s cheeky sleuth series featuring a book-loving, gun-toting, wit-slinging heroine named Thursday Next. In Thursday''s world, an alternate version of 1985 London, literature rules popular culture--audiences enact and participate in Richard III for Friday-night fun, thousands of visitors make literary pilgrimages to gawk at original manuscripts, and missionaries travel door-to-door heralding Francis Bacon as the true Bard. The mysterious theft of the Martin Chuzzlewit original manuscript from the Dickens Museum catalyzes Thursday''s transformation from humble library cop into intrepid literature savior. When Thursday''s eccentric uncle Mycroft and aunt Polly are kidnapped along with their Prose Portal, an ingenious device that allows readers to physically enter the world of any book, the SpecOps literary division uncovers a dastardly plot to kidnap and murder characters from everyone''s favorite novels. The criminal operation is helmed by Acheron Hades, the third most evil man in the world, a supreme villain who bends minds, shifts shapes, and remains impervious to most mortal weapons. Thursday and her SpecOps cohorts'' mission to capture their slippery adversary is further complicated by the meddling of the pointedly named Jack Schitt, the despotic head of security at the hegemonic Goliath Corporation, whose investment in Hades'' capture seems suspect. And when the perpetrators dare to steal the original Jane Eyre, Thursday must race to save one of the most beloved characters in English literature--and Bront Excerpt from Book 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 My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don''t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn''t know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was. Dad had remained at liberty ever since; we learned from his subsequent visits that he regarded the whole service as "morally and historically corrupt" and was fighting a one-man war against the bureaucrats within the Office for Special Temporal Stability. I didn''t know what he meant by that and still don''t; I just hoped he knew what he was doing and didn''t come to any harm doing it. His skills at stopping the clock were hard-earned and irreversible: He was now a lonely itinerant in time, belonging to not one age but to all of them and having no home other than the chronoclastic ether. I wasn''t a member of the ChronoGuard. I never wanted to be. By all accounts it''s not a huge barrel of laughs, although the pay is good and the service boasts a retirement plan that is second to none: a one-way ticket to anywhere and anywhen you want. No, that wasn''t for me. I was what we called an "operative grade I" for SO-27, the Literary Detective Division of the Special Operations Network based in London. It''s way less flash than it sounds. Since 1980 the big criminal gangs had moved in on the lucrative literary market and we had much to do and few funds to do it with. I worked under Area Chief Boswell, a small, puffy man who looked like a bag of flour with arms and legs. He lived and breathed the job; words were his life and his love-he never seemed happier than when he was on the trail of a counterfeit Coleridge or a fake Fielding. It was under Boswell that we arrested the gang who were stealing and selling Samuel Johnson first editions; on another occasion we uncovered an attempt to authenticate a flagrantly unrealistic version of Shakespeare''s lost work, Cardenio. Fun while it lasted, but only small islands of excitement among the ocean of day-to-day mundanities that is SO-27: We spent most of our time dealing with illegal traders, copyright infringements and fraud. I had been with Boswell and SO-27 for eight years, living in a Maida Vale apartment with Pickwick, a regenerated pet dodo left over from the days when reverse extinction was all the rage and you could buy home cloning kits over the counter. I was keen-no, I was desperate-to get away from the LiteraTecs but transfers were unheard of and promotion a nonstarter. The only way I was going to make full inspector was if my immediate superior moved on or out. But it never happened; Inspector Turner''s hope to marry a wealthy Mr. Right and leave the service stayed just that-a hope-as so often Mr. Right turned out to be either Mr. Liar, Mr. Drunk or Mr. Already Married. As I said earlier, my father had a face that could stop a clock; and that''s exactly what happened one spring morning as I was having a sandwich in a small cafZ not far from work. The world flickered, shuddered and stopped. The proprietor of the cafZ froze in midsentence and the picture on the television stopped dead. Outside, birds hung motionless in the sky. Cars and trams halted in the streets and a cyclist involved in an accident stopped in midair, the look of fear frozen on his face as he paused two feet from the hard asphalt. The sound halted too, replaced by a dull snapshot of a hum, the world''s noise at that moment in time paused indefinitely at the same pitch and volume. "How''s my gorgeous daughter?" I turned. My father was sitting at a table and rose to hug me affectionately. "I''m good," I replied, returning his hug tightly. "How''s my favorite father?" "Can''t complain. Time is a fine physician." I stared at him for a moment. "Y''know," I muttered, "I think you''re looking younger every time I see you." "I am. Any grandchildren in the offing?&q, [PU: Penguin Books]<