Dark Reading Matter

Praise for the Thursday Next Books   “Playful . . . It’s not hard to see what this enthusiasm is about . . . It’s easy to be delighted by a writer who loves books so madly.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “What keeps this series humming is Fforde’s lively engagement with books and the indefatigable woman he’s created to defend them.” —People “Richly crammed with jokes, ideas, and action. Brainier silliness is hard to find.” —USA Today   “Reading a truly good book, the page opens like a trapdoor and you simply fall through. The Eyre Affair takes that feeling, the moment you lose the sense of yourself and become engrossed in the story, and creates high adventure and wild drama around the porous boundaries between fiction and real life.” —The Guardian “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 “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