The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Review by Marian Powell

Is Thursday Next really an appropriate name for the main character of a novel? If the novel is a totally insane romp through time, history and literature, it is.

Thursday Next is a Literary Detective in a world where time travel is commonplace and so are criminals who make use of it. Someone is kidnapping characters out of books and threatening to rewrite them. That's bad enough when it's a minor character, but when Jane Eyre is stolen out of the book by that name, it means the classic will never be written if Thursday doesn't rescue her.

The Eyre Affair will make your head spin as you attempt to keep up with chases, murders, and endless attempts to alter history. Buried in all the fun is a serious question. If time travel were commonplace, wouldn't you be tempted to alter a historical event to make it happen the way you feel it should have happened? Now imagine a world with thousands of people altering history and many other thousands trying to change it back and you have the world of The Eyre Affair.

If you love The Hitchhiker's Guide or Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, you'll probably love this story. If you hated those books, you'd be wise to avoid The Eyre Affair.

The Eyre Affair is the first book in a series, incidentally. The second book is titled Lost in a Good Book and the third one is The Well of Lost Plots.