Synopses & Reviews
The
New York Times bestseller and the wildly inventive sixth installment of a series that has more than one million copies (and counting) in print.
Dazzlingly funny and imaginative, Jasper Fforde's books have won him the affection of readers, reviewers, and-dare we say it-booksellers alike. Fans can breathe a sigh of relief because Thursday Next-or at least one of her-is back. At a time of great unrest in the BookWorld, only the ace literary detective can avert a devastating Genre War-thing is, Thursday has vanished. Now the written Thursday must answer the call, save the Bookworld, evade capture, and find the actual Thursday! With a clockwork Butler in tow, and Men in Plaid as well as her Designated Love Interest in pursuit, she must reluctantly agree to journey up the mysterious Metaphoric River for answers. Thursday’s zany investigations continue with Jasper Fforde’s latest bestseller, The Woman Who Died A Lot. Visit jasperfforde.com for a ffull window into the Ffordian world!
Review
andldquo;Jam-packed with spot-on parody, puns, and wry observations about words and genres that will delight literary-minded fans of the series.andrdquo;andnbsp;andnbsp;
Review
andldquo;Geeky humor jostles with genuine insight about the current state of fiction.... Take a joy ride with the passionate reader who wrote this novel.andquot;andnbsp;
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“There is no denying Fforde’s supersized imagination, linguistic agility, and love of books, Books, BOOKS.” Chicago Sun-Times
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“Fforde is a breath of fresh air.” Kirkus
Review
andquot;Fforde's books are more than just an ingenious idea. They are written with buoyant zest and are tautly plotted. They have empathetic heroes and heroines who nearly make terrible mistakes and suitably dastardly villains who do. They also have more twists and turns than Christie, and are embellished with the rich details of Dickens or Pratchett.andquot;andnbsp;andnbsp;
Review
andquot;A riot of puns, in-jokes and literary allusions that Fforde carries off with aplomb.andquot;andnbsp;
Review
andquot;Fans of the late Douglas Adams, or, even, Monty Python, will feel at home with Fforde.andquot;andnbsp;andnbsp;
Review
andldquo;There is no denying Ffordeandrsquo;s supersized imagination, linguistic agility, and love of books, Books, BOOKS.andrdquo;andnbsp;andnbsp;
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andldquo;Fforde is a breath of fresh air.andrdquo;andnbsp;andnbsp;
Review
Praise for One of Our Thursdays is Missing “One of Our Thursdays is Missing, like other Fforde novels, is jam packed with spot-on parody, puns and wry observations about words and genres that will delight literary-minded fans of the series.” - Los Angeles Times “There is no denying Fforde’s supersized imagination, linguistic agility and love of books, Books, BOOKS.” - Chicago Sun-Times “Fforde’s diabolical meshing of insight and humor makes a ‘mimefield’ both frightening and funny, while the reader must traverse a volume that’s minefield of unexpected turns and amusing twists.” - Publishers Weekly “One of Our Thursdays is Missing is filled with passages [in] which geeky humor jostles with genuine insight about the current state of fiction.… [T]ake a joy ride with the passionate reader who wrote this novel.” - Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel “[With a] furiously agile imagination…Fforde has shaken up genres—fantasy, comedy, crime, sci-fi, parody, literary criticism—and come up with a superb mishmash with lots of affectionate in-jokes for any book lover.” - Miami Herald “Fforde is a breath of fresh air.” -Kirkus “Fforde’s books are more than just an ingenious idea. They are written with buoyant zest and are tautly plotted. They have empathetic heroes and heroines who nearly make terrible mistakes and suitably dastardly villains who do. They also have more twists and turns than Christie, and are embellished with the rich details of Dickens or Pratchett.” -Independent “A riot of puns, in-jokes and literary allusions that Fforde carries off with aplomb.” - Daily Mail “Fans of the late Douglas Adams, or, even, Monty Python, will feel at home with Fforde.” Herald
Review
Praise for The Woman Who Died A Lot, the next installment in the Thursday Next series “Fforde continues to show that his forte is absurdist humor in his seventh crime thriller starring Thursday Next, a member of the Literary Detectives division of Special Operations in an alternate-universe Britain. [An] endearingly-bizarre fantasy world limited only by Fforde’s impressive imagination.” –Publishers Weekly “As always, Fforde makes this wacky world perfectly plausible, elucidating Ffordian physics with just the right ratio of pseudoscientific jargon to punch lines. It’s a dazzling, heady brew of high concept and low humor, absurd antics with a tea-and-toast sensibility that will appeal to fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse alike. Fforde is ffantastic!”–Booklist (starred review) “Strap in and hang on tight.... Another winner for fans and lovers of sf, time travel, puns, allusions, and all sorts of literary hijinks.”–Library Journal (Starred review) “Jasper Fforde fans, rejoice! The Woman Who Died a Lot, the seventh installment in his Thursday Next series, delivers all the imagination, complexity and laughs we've come to expect from Fforde and his book-hopping, butt-kicking heroine.The Woman Who Died a Lot brings together the charming lunacy and intricate plotting that have enthralled Fforde's readers over the years.” –Shelf Awareness “In Misery, Stephen King compares the euphoric feeling writers experience in creative bursts to ‘falling into a hole filled with bright light.’ Avid readers also know that feeling: A good story temporarily erases the world. British novelist Jasper Fforde has expanded on King’s simile in a wonderful seven-book series of novels featuring Thursday Next. Enormously knowledgeable about literary history, Fforde scatters nuggets for nerdy readers like me. By the end, all of Fforde’s myriad particles of plot, accelerated by his immense skill and narrative sense, collide, producing pyrotechnics and a passel of new particles to propel his next tale. I love the Thursday Next books, and when a new one appears, I don’t fall but leap into this bibliophile’s Wonderland.” –The Cleveland Plain Dealer “This is the proverbial madcap lighthearted romp, full of hijinks, parody, and puns. Jasper Fforde does it well. It’s safe to say that if you enjoy that particularly British, Douglas Adams-style absurd delivery of wry observations, you’ll get a kick out of this one.” –New York Journal of Books“The Welsh writer Jasper Fforde's wildly inventive books defy easy description — more accurately, they mercilessly mock the concept of easy description. Are they mysteries? Outrageous parodies of literary classics? Science fiction? Absurdist humor? Gleeful mashups of all the above?” [The Woman Who Died A Lot is] still big, big fun, with enough in-jokes to keep anyone snickering for a long time — especially English Lit geeks.” –The Seattle Times “Quirky and surprising and funny. Thursday fans will welcome her return.”–The Free Lance–Star
Synopsis
The newest tour de force from The New York Times bestselling author of Thursday Next and Shades of Grey.
Jasper Fforde's exuberant return to the fantastical BookWorld opens during a time of great unrest. All-out Genre war is rumbling, and the BookWorld desperately needs a heroine like Thursday Next. But with the real Thursday apparently retired to the Realworld, the Council of Genres turns to the written Thursday.
The Council wants her to pretend to be the real Thursday and travel as a peacekeeping emissary to the warring factions. A trip up the mighty Metaphoric River beckons-a trip that will reveal a fiendish plot that threatens the very fabric of the BookWorld itself.
Once again New York Times bestselling author Jasper Fforde has a field day gleefully blending satire, romance, and thriller with literary allusions galore in a fantastic adventure through the landscape of a frisky and fertile imagination. Fans will rejoice that their favorite character in the Fforde universe is back.
About the Author
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 series of Thursday Next novels, which includes
Lost in a Good Book,
The Well of Lost Plots,
Something Rotten,
First Among Sequels,
One of Our Thursdays is Missing, and
The Woman Who Died A Lot. The series has more than one million copies (and counting) in print. He is also the author of
The Big Over Easy and
The Fourth Bear of the Nursery Crime series,
Shades of Grey, and books for young readers, including
The Last Dragonslayer. Visit jasperfforde.com.