The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [291]
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 1-101-15862-X
A VIKING BOOK®
Viking Books first published by The Viking Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
VIKING and the “VIKING” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: June, 2004
For Mari
who makes the torches burn brighter
Contents
Thursday Next: The Story So Far . . .
Author’s Note
1. The Absence of Breakfast
2. Inside Caversham Heights
3. Three Witches, Multiple Choice and Sarcasm
4. Landen Parke-Laine
5. The Well of Lost Plots
6. Night of the Grammasites
7. Feeding the Minotaur
8. Ton-Sixty on the A419
9. Apples Benedict, a Hedgehog and Commander Bradshaw
10. Jurisfiction Session No. 40319
11. Introducing UltraWord™
12. Wuthering Heights
14. Educating the Generics
15. Landen Parke-Somebody
16. Captain Nemo
17. Minotaur Trouble
18. Snell Rest in Peece and Lucy Deane
19. Shadow the Sheepdog
20. Ibb and Obb Named and Heights Again
21. Who Stole the Tarts?
22. Crimean Nightmares
23. Jurisfiction Session No. 40320
24. Pledges, the Council of Genres and Searching for Deane
25. Havisham—the Final Bow
26. Post-Havisham Blues
27. The Lighthouse at the Edge of My Mind
28. Lola Departs and Heights Again
29. Mrs. Bradshaw and Solomon (Judgments) Inc.
30. Revelations
31. Tables Turned
32. The 923rd Annual BookWorld Awards
33. Ultra Word™
34. Loose Ends
34a. Heavy Weather
(Bonus chapter exclusive to the U.S. edition)
Credits
Thursday Next: The Story So Far . . .
Swindon, Wessex, England, circa 1985. SpecOps is the agency responsible for policing areas considered too specialized to be tackled by the regular force, and Thursday Next is attached to the Literary Detectives at SpecOps-27. Following the successful return of Jane Eyre to the novel of the same name, vanquishing master criminal Acheron Hades and bringing peace to the Crimean peninsula, she finds herself a minor celebrity.
On the trail of the seemingly miraculous discovery of the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio, she crosses swords with Yorrick Kaine, escapee from fiction and neofascist politician. She also finds herself blackmailed by the vast multinational known as the Goliath Corporation, who want their operative Jack Schitt out of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” in which he was imprisoned. To achieve this they call on Lavoisier, a corrupt member of the time-traveling SpecOps elite, the ChronoGuard, to kill off Thursday’s husband. Traveling back thirty-eight years, Lavoisier engineers a fatal accident for the twoyear-old Landen, but leaves Thursday’s memories of him intact—she finds herself the only person who knows he once lived.
In an attempt to rescue her eradicated husband, she finds a way to enter fiction itself—and discovers that not only is there a policing agency within the BookWorld known as Jurisfiction, but that she has been apprenticed as a trainee agent to Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. With her skills at bookjumping growing under Miss Havisham’s stern and often unorthodox tuition, Thursday rescues Jack Schitt, only to discover she has been duped. Goliath has no intention of reactualizing her husband and instead wants her to open a door into fiction, something Goliath has decided is a “rich untapped marketplace” for their varied but spectacularly worthless products and services.
Thursday, pregnant with Landen’s child and pursued by Goliath and Acheron’s little sister, Aornis, an evil genius with a penchant for clothes shopping and memory modification, decides to enter the BookWorld and retire temporarily to the place where all fiction is created: the Well of Lost Plots. Taking refuge in an unpublished book of dubious quality as part of the Character