The Eyre Affair: Thursday Next Book 1 (Paperback)

'Ingenious - I'll watch Jasper Fforde nervously' - Terry Pratchett

'Neatly delivers alternate history, Monty Pythonesque comedy skits, Grand Guignol supervillains, thwarted lovers, po-mo intertextuality, political commentary, time travel, vampires, absent-minded inventors, a hard-boiled narrator, and lots, lots more. . . . Suspend your disbelief, find a quiet corner and just surrender to the storytelling voice of the unstoppable, ever-resourceful Thursday Next.' - The Washington Post 

'Fforde's imaginative novel will satiate readers looking for a Harry Potter-esque tale... The Eyre Affair's literary wonderland recalls Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers series, the works of Lewis Carroll and Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode.' - USA Today 

'[Thursday Next is] part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry.' - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 

'Delightfully clever... Filled with clever wordplay, literary allusion and bibliowit, The Eyre Affair combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but its quirky charm is all its own' - The Wall Street Journal 

'Jasper Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, is a spirited sendup of genre fiction-it's part hardboiled mystery, part time-machine caper-that features a sassy, well-read 'Special Operative in literary detection' named Thursday Next, who will put you more in mind of Bridget Jones than Miss Marple. Fforde delivers almost every sentence with a sly wink, and he's got an easy way with wordplay, trivia, and inside jokes... Fforde's verve is rarely less than infectious - The New York Times Book Review 

'What Fforde is pulling is a variation on the classic Monty Python gambit: the incongruous juxtaposition og low comedy and high erudition - this scam has not been pulled off with such off-hand finesse and manic verve since the Pythons shut up shop. 'The Eyre Affair' is a silly book for smart people: postmodernism played as raw, howling farce' - The Independent 

'It is always a privilege to watch the birth of a cult, and Hodder has just cut the umbilical cord. Always ridiculous, often hilarious ... blink and you miss a vital narrative leap. There are shades of Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, 'Clockwork Orange' and '1984'. And that's just for starters' - Time Out 

'Surely a cult in the making' - Marie Clare