Book he is in a relationship with Miles Hawke, an operative with SpecOps-14. Mycroft Next Thursday's uncle and husband of Polly. Mycroft is an inventor of strange and unusual devices of varying degrees of use. Some have proved to be important plot devices throughout the series, such as his Prose Portal, which allowed real-world individuals to enter books and the Ovinator, which encourages cooperation. Others, such as his device for erasing memories (which he has no recollection of ever inventing) serve purely as running gags. He has been hunted by the Goliath Corporation, who wished to use his Prose Portal to retrieve fictional weaponry from the Bookworld to sell in the real world. He retired into the Bookworld, living within the Sherlock Holmes series of books, where he occasionally interfered with the narrative, appearing as Holmes' brother. By the time of Something Rotten he and Polly had returned safely to the real world, having used the memory erasure device to ensure that they were of no use to Goliath. Polly Next A brilliant mathematician, Thursday's aunt, and wife of Mycroft. She generally serves as Mycroft's assistant, as she possesses far more common sense than her husband. She was temporarily held hostage within the William Wordsworth poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by Acheron Hades during the events of The Eyre Affair. Enjoys tormenting door-to-door salesmen along with Thursday's mother. Thursday Next Wednesday Next Mother to Thursday Next and her brothers. She used to work for SpecOps 3 (and claims to still do so on occasion), but has now become something of a homebody, and is generally found there throughout the novels. She loves her husband, despite his eradication, but has occasional suspicions about his fidelity, particularly regarding his dealings with Lady Emma Hamilton. She herself is not immune to other men, it transpires, as she develops an apparent interest in Otto Bismarck when he stays with her for a few days. On the other hand, having no official husband, she is believed by most to have conceived three children outside of wedlock, something that affects her social life. Landen Parke-Laine Thursday's husband, Landen is an award-winning novelist whose books include Bad Sofa, Memoirs of A Crimean Veteran and Once Were Scoundrels. He served as an officer in the Crimean War (still raging in Fforde's alternate 1985), during which he came into contact with Thursday, with whom he fell in