The release date for the English version of 'The Eyre Affair' by
Jasper Fforde is Feb 2003. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
In 1985, time travel was commonplace, cloning was a fact (dodos were the preferred revived pet), and literature was highly valued. There are riots between the Surrealists and Impressionists, hundreds of men are called John Milton in honor to the genuine Milton, and the police are faced with a very perplexing problem as Baconians attempt to persuade the world that Francis Bacon really authored Shakespeare. Acheron Hades, the Third Most Wanted Man in the World, murders a minor character and takes Martin Chuzzlewit's original manuscript in the middle of all of this, making the minor character vanish from every printed volume of the work! However, that's just an introduction.
The adored Jane Eyre is Hades' true aim, and it doesn't take long for him to take her out of Bronte's book. Enter Thursday Next. She drives a Porsche and is the famed literary investigator for the Special Operative. Thursday enters the book using her uncle Mycroft's Prose Portal to save Jane Eyre from this horrible case of literary murder. With so many outsiders scuttling about Thornfield, treachery is rife as they meet encounters with Jane, Rochester, and Miss Fairfax. Can Bronte's masterwork, Jane Eyre, be saved on Thursday? What about the conflict in Crimea? When will it end? And what about those irksome black holes that periodically erupt, drawing objects into gaps in space and time?
The Eyre Affair is a caper unlike any other, an introduction to the mind of a highly original writer and his own fictitious world. It is suspenseful and bizarre, engaging and amusing.