Jasper Fforde books

[dudette]

This holiday I picked up "The Big Over Easy"by the above-mentioned author and was intrigued at the blurb ...

'It looks like he died from injuries sustained during a fall...'
Bestselling author Jasper Fforde begins an effervescent new series. It's Easter in Reading - a bad time for eggs - and no one can remember the last sunny day. Humpty Dumpty, well-known nursery favourite, large egg, ex-convict and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Following the pathologist's careful reconstruction of Humpty's shell, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his Sergeant, Mary Mary, are soon grappling with a sinister plot involving cross-border money laundering, the illegal Bearnaise sauce market, corporate politics and the cut and thrust world of international Chiropody. As Jack and Mary stumble around the streets of Reading in Jack's Lime Green Austin Allegro, the clues pile up, but Jack has his own problems to deal with. And on top of everything else, the JellyMan is coming to town...



The story took a little getting into, but I found the story interesting and while not side-splittingly funny, was entertaining. does anyone else like this writer?
I've bought a book from his Thursday Next series, just to check if he's for me or not...

[nikkinaz]

I have never read any of his books although I have seen them in the library - maybe was not in the mood at the time...let us know what the second book was like and I might give it a go... :mmm:

[dudette]

I finally got around to reading the first of his Thursday Next seriesThe Eyre Affair , and I must say I am hooked.

It reads as a crime novel in a parallel universe, but certain aspects of our lives are different.


Amazon.co.uk Review
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.

Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney


I loved the puns and clever twists the author leads through, and after discovering one of the character's name is Oswald Mandias, I was tempted for the first time ever to go back and read some of Shelley and William Blake's poetry! Most unlike me :haha: (the last time I laid eyes on it was Matric English
I'm sure there are many more literary references I am missing, but am enjoying the ride nonetheless.

I would definitely recommend Jasper Fforde. Great fun :thumbs: