On the advice of her future self, she accepts a transfer to Swindon, her old hometown, just in time to be involved in the theft of the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. She won't believe it, though, until she has proof. She's wounded in the ensuing fight, but everyone tells her that Acheron is now dead. Thursday Next, a SpecOps agent specializing in literary crimes (of which there are many in her alternate-reality Britain), is drawn into confrontation with Acheron Hades, the third most evil man in the world (we're told you don't want to know who #1 and #2 are).

And for Special Operative Thursday Next this is only the beginning. In Jasper Fforde's singular fictional universe no literary character is safe from crime. A brilliantly outlandish and absorbing caper destined to become a classic adventure tale, The Eyre Affair is an irresistible thriller and the introduction to the imagination of a most distinctive writer. Aided and abetted by characters that include her time-traveling father, an executive of the all-powerful Goliath Corporation, and Edward Rochester himself, Thursday must track down the world's Third Most Wanted criminal and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide. When this madman plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Bronte's novel Thursday faces the challenge of her career. This is all business as usual for brainy, bookish (and heat-packing) Thursday Next, a renowned Special Operative in literary detection - that is, until someone begins murdering characters from works of literature.

And forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in Wordsworth poems, militant Baconians roam freely spreading the gospel that Bacon, not Shakespeare, penned those immortal works. Based on an imaginary world where time and reality bend in the most convincing and original way since The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Eyre Affair is a delightful rabbit hole of a read: once you fall in you may never come back. Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodas are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously.

The eyre affair series order