A funny and clever book about literary detective, Thursday Next, trying to find the stolen Martin Chuzzlewit before Acheron Hades starts rewriting history. Very inventive.

Picked this up at the Walthamstow bookcrossing meet up at the Nags Head. It comes highly recommended!

I'm afraid I just didn't get on very well with this. I guess I could see it's appeal, but for some reason, it just wasn't for me. I could see that the idea behind it was pretty interesting and different, but the author just appeared to be trying too hard. Also, some of the jokes were, and I'm being kind here, lame. I mean, one of the pantomime-esque villains was called 'Jack Schitt'. I kid you not. I couldn't see anyone over the age of eleven finding that funny.

In short, I could see what the author was trying to do, but it just didn't come off for me. Never mind, eh? I'll move this on at the earliest opportunity.

On it's way to Sobergirl as a RABCK.

Thank you MrMustard!
The book has arrived safe and sound!

I'm reading this book now.
It's up for grabs in a RABCK draw. Whoever wins it will have to be patient. The book will goes on loan to another BCer before I can send it to it's new home (the one who wins it in the RABCK draw).

Amazon.co.uk Review
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.
Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney

Congratulations to Kiptos who won this in the Gratitude RABCK draw!

Ha ha ha!!!!! I've truly enjoyed this book
I'm sure I'd have the time of my life at Thornfield!
And now I want a dodo for pet.

The book is going on loan to Savotar tomorrow, after she's read it I will mail it to Kiptos who won it in the RABCK earlier tonight!

Thank you Sobergirl. I try to read this ASAP!

Hmm... I don't know what to say about this book. I kind of liked the idea and found the book entertaining, but from time to time I sort of lost the glue. I liked the references to literary classics very much though!

The book will go back to Sobergirl soon.

Now the book is back with me and will travel to kiptos tomorrow!

Edit 26th June 2008:
Sent to kiptos today by airmail!

Received this lovely package today, thanks Sobergirl for the RABCK and for all the lovely and so colourful stamps, all 12 of them. They will add nicely to my collection. =)