The Eyre Affair (2003)

By Jasper Fforde
I thought this book was tops. It follows the adventures of our heroine, Thursday Next, who works for a special government agency that tracks down crimes against literature (eg forgeries, exceptionally bad productions of Shakespeare etc). Things get a bit weird when the villain, Acheron Hades (a truly villainous villain), steals the original copy of Dicken’s Martin Chuzzlewit and threatens to take out the hero and thus change the manuscript for ever – with the help of Thursday’s uncle’s new invention, the Prose Portal. (In the testing stages his wife gets trapped in one of Wordsworth’s poems – and it turns out Wordsworth’s a bit of a flirt). When this evil plan doesn’t work out quite as he intended, Hades decides to pick on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre instead.

Next’s world is one in which literature is much more popular with the masses than in ours – so much so that there is a copy of William Shakespeare’s Complete Works in every hotel room, along with the Bible and several other religious texts, and the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is a frequent and serious topic of discussion. I liked the character of Thursday Next extremely (she’s a smart chick! Maybe not at genius level, but pretty good), and Acheron Hades was an excellent villain. I think I’ve found a new favourite author and will be looking for a hardback copy for my bookshelves.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10