The Well of Lost Plots

December 15, 2003
In this delicious sequel to The Eyre Affair
and Lost in a Good Book
, Fforde's redoubtable (and now throwing-up-pregnant) heroine Thursday Next once again does battle with philistine bibliophobes, taking a furlough from her duties as a SpecOps Literary Detective to vacation in the Well of Lost Plots, the 26 noisome sub-basements of the Great Library. Pursued by her memory-modifying nemesis Aornis Hades, Thursday joins Jurisfiction's Character Exchange Program, filling in for "Mary," sidekick to the world-weary detective hero of Caversham Heights
, a hilariously awful police procedural. At the imminent launch of UltraWord, the vaunted "Last Word" in Story Operating Systems, Thursday's friend and mentor Miss Havisham is gruesomely killed, and Thursday gamely sets out to restore order to her underground world, where technophiles ruthlessly recycle unpublished books and sell plot devices and stock characters on the black market. Meanwhile, Aornis is doing her fiendish worst to make Thursday forget Landen, her missing husband and father of her child. If this all sounds a bit confusing, it is—until the reader gets the hang of Fforde's intricate mix of parody, social satire and sheer gut-busting fantasy. Marvelous creations like syntax-slaughtering grammasites and the murderous Minotaur roam this unusual novel's pages, and Fforde's fictional epigraphs, like his minihistory of "book operating systems," are worth the cover price in themselves. Fforde's sidesplitting sendup of an increasingly antibookish society is a sheer joy. (Feb.)

Forecast:
Despite the rarefied nature of his spoofing, Fforde has attracted a substantial and loyal readership. Expect fans to turn out in droves on the 20-city author tour.

February 23, 2004
Those new to the Thursday Next series may feel as if they've fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole after listening to a few chapters of Fforde's newest mystery (after Eyre Affair), which is set entirely in other books. Reader Sastre gamely plows through the linguistically complex text and endows the heroine, intrepid detective Thursday Next, with a friendly yet determined voice that rings true to her Northern England roots. But puzzling details soon come to light, such as the fact that Thursday is vacationing in an unpublished book. Insightful listeners (and only the well-read should even attempt this audiobook) will come to realize that Thursday has swapped places with a character named Mary, who resides in a cliched, and thus unpublished, detective novel located in the Well of Lost Plots. The Well, situated in the sub-basement of the Great Library, is a ruthless underworld where a host of wild creatures, including parasitic grammasites and fatal speling vyruses, abound. Sastre stretches her vocal cords to the limit, screeching for one character and swooping low for another. In the end, listeners will leave this zany literary circus with a ringing headache and a whole new appreciation for both books and audiobooks.