The Well of Lost Plots
by Jasper Fforde

In this third "Thursday Next novel,” a celebrated Literary Detective has taken refuge from reality (where her husband has been cruelly erased), into the world of books. And I don’t just mean that she locks herself in a room full of books and reads day and night. Those of you who have followed the series so far won’t be surprised to know that she has actually entered the realm populated by fictional characters and beasts. Living in an unpublished novel by way of the Character Exchange Program, Thursday undergoes her apprenticeship as a member of Jurisfiction: the force that polices narrative integrity, and the boundary between truth and fiction.

The world in which this book takes place is a wild, weird, chaotic world full of literary gags, genre crossovers, and glimpses of your favorite book characters “between the pages” where you know them well. It is a world where novels take shape in the Well of Lost Plots, complete with merchants, parasites, and scrapyards for verbs and plot devices. It is a world where the characters in Wuthering Heights need anger management therapy, where dangerous creatures are corraled in the pages of an unpublished sci-fi novel, and where “fiction infractions” (such as changing the plot of a classic novel) are judged by the court of the King and Queen of Hearts.

Thursday finds herself working with characters from Charles Dickens, Beatrix Potter, pulp sci-fi, romance, and adventure novels. Professionally, she is driven to solve a series of vicious murders in which the targets are her fellow Jurisfiction operatives – and the motive has something to do with a new “book operating system” that is about to go online. Privately, she wants to help the characters in Caversham Heights save their book from being scrapped, so that she can stay there and give birth to a child whose father has been eradicated from history. And even more privately, Thursday has to battle an enemy who has invaded her own mind, threatening to make her forget her one true love.

Perhaps not for the underage and certainly not for anyone who hasn’t read at least a few of the books lampooned in its pages, The Well of Lost Plots is an absolute must-read for the rest of us: the continuation of an irreverently original series that, amazingly, continues to break new ground. Like the other Thursday Next tales, this book is belly-laugh-funny, mentally stimulating, and scary-exciting in swift alternation, and often at the same time. The “book world” introduced in the earlier stories achieves levels of fantastic oddness you never dreamed of, while the characters (particularly our heroine) continue to grow in emotional depth. Still linked to the almost-as-bizarre, alternate-1980s England from which Thursday came, with its genetically re-engineered dodos, time-traveling secret agents, and other quirks too numerous to describe here, it promises more adventure to come in the fourth novel, Something Rotten, as well as the spin-off series called Nursery Crime, whose origins form a part of this story.

Robbie Fischer
USA

Recommended Age: 17+

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