title: The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel
author:  Jasper Fforde 
description: It's 1985 in England, at least on the calendar; the Crimean War is in its hundred-and-thirty-first year; time travel is nothing new; Japanese tourists slip in and out of Victorian novels; and the literary branch of the special police, led gamely by the beguiling Thursday Next, are pursuing Acheron Hades, who has stolen the manuscript of &quot;Martin Chuzzlewit&quot; and set his sights on kidnapping the character Jane Eyre, a theft that could have disastrous consequences for Bront&euml; lovers who like their story straight. This rambunctious caper could be taken as a warning about what might happen if society considered literature really important&mdash;like, say, energy futures or accounting. <br> Copyright &copy; 2005 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Yorker/dp/B00005N7T5/"><i>The New Yorker</i></a>
zlib_text: The Eyre Affair
  
  Jasper Fforde
  
  The Eyre Affair
  
  
  scanned by Ginevra
  
  corrected by b0rdR
  
  Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and
  intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair  puts 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