Jasper Fforde is a British author who specialises in alternate history and metafiction in his comic fantasy stories. He used to work on films as a focus puller before his novels began to be published.
The Eyre Affair is the Fforde’s first published novel and the first book in the alternate history of the Thursday Next series.
It is the year 1985, Thursday Next lives in London with her cloned pet dodo, Pickwick, working as a literary detective when she’s promoted to look for her former professor cum terrorist, Acheron Hades. Soon after he dies in a car crash, she receives a visit from her future self telling her that he’s not dead and that she should move to Swindon. It turns out that Hades has a plot to steal the original manuscript of Jane Eyre and, using a machine Thursday’s uncle Mycroft has created, enter the story to destroy by killing the characters. Meanwhile, the global corporation, Goliath, wants the machine for their own less than virtuous reasons.
Lost in a Good Book is the second book in the Thursday Next series.
Three months after saving – and changing the ending of – Jane Eyre, Thursday Next has married her fiance, Landen Park-Lane, Mycroft has destroyed the Prose Portal, her time-travelling father has told her that the world will end soon, and a lost Shakespeare play has been discovered right there in Swindon. If that wasn’t enough for her to deal with, she’s being contacted from within fiction by a lawyer who claims to be defending her in the case against her for altering the ending of Jane Eyre. After learning to jump into stories by herself, she is put on trial in Kafka’s The Trial, then apprenticed to Miss Havisham in order to join Jurisfiction, the police force within books.
The Big Over Easy is set in another alternate history, albeit one still similar to the Thursday Next books. It is the first book in the Nursery Crime series.
DCI Jack Spratt lives in a shoe with his second wife and their five children where they are trying to rent out the spare room. He works as the head of the Nursery Crime Division where he has just been assigned a new Detective Sergeant, Mary Mary. Together they are called in to investigate the death of prominent former socialite, Humpty Dumpty. A number of suspects turn up, including Rapunzel, her husband, Solomon Grundy, beloved businessman Randolph Spongg, Humpty’s ex-wife, and his psychiatrist.
Shades of Grey, alternately titled Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron, is a dystopian alternate history novel and the first in the eponymous series.
In the society of Chromatacia your social standing is dependant entirely on which and how much colour you’re able to see. Those who are unable to make out enough colour are referred to as Greys and are seen as second-class citizens. Eddie Russet is a young Red who is being sent to the outer fringe town of East Carmine, ostensibly for a chair census but probably as the result of playing a practical joke on the son of a Prefect. There he becomes enamoured with a local Grey, the violently short-tempered Jane G23. In his time at East Carmine, Eddie will soon find that things about his society are not all as they seem.
Space and Dragons 