The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I LOVE this book. What can I say? Quirky people like quirky books and based on friends' evaluations of me - this book and I are soul mates! This series and all the adventures that abound within the pages left me begging for more. I mean that, literally. Jasper Fforde is a British novelist and the Thursday Next books for a while were available in Britain several months before they were available in the US. The Dormouse is British. I would beg her every Summer to bring the newest book home to me. What is it about these odd and confusing books that had me so enraptured? The humor and action that ran through every page!

The Eyre Affair, the first book in the series, introduces us to our heroine - Thursday Next. The year is 1985 and the setting is England, but this is NOT out England in our 1985. In Thursday's world artistic renaissances turn into bloody revolutions, the Crimean War had been going on for over 130 years, and Shakespeare might as well be a religion. Thursday is a literary detective and the first novel brings her up against the third most wanted criminal, Acheron Hades. Fictional characters are going missing and it's Acheron who is kidnapping them out of their original manuscripts. Thursday must catch a mad man who can look like anyone and can rip characters out of their books. This twisted, funny, and sometimes unnerving adventure will take Thursday into the very pages of the novels' themselves.

Fun, twisted, and different in a really good way, these books should appeal to anyone who's ever liked Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, or Christopher Moore.

Book Description:
In Jasper Fforde'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's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. 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.