The Eyre Affair

There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where Wales is a Soviet Republic, dodos are available in home-cloning kits, the Crimean war is 131 years old and the ending of ‘Jane Eyre’ is less than satisfactory . . .

In “this” 1985, normalcy is a rare commodity: aunts are lost inside Wordsworth poems, militant Baconians heckle performances of ‘Hamlet’, and forging Byronic verse carries a custodial sentence. For literary detective Thursday Next, it’s very much business as usual.

Thursday – her tenacity as remarkable as her love life is disastrous – is frantically pursuing the world’s third most evil man who has kidnapped Jane Eyre in a dastardly display of literary vandalism. With its narrator missing, half the book is blank and the world holds its breath. As if that wasn’t enough, Thursday also has to assist her time-traveling father, marry the man she loves, figure out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, bring peace to the Crimea – and finally discover the truth about bananas . . .