Dark Reading Matter

Will literary Special Ops agent Thursday Next find her happy ending? The outrageous, heartfelt conclusion to Jasper Fforde's New York Times-bestselling series, which began twenty-five years ago with The Eyre Affair, will have you, Dear Reader, laughing out loud.

Swindon-based Literary Detective Thursday Next is embarking on her eighth and final adventure, Dark Reading Matter, and she is well aware of the fact. The problem is, others are too. Old foes and new are plotting a terrible revenge: to disrupt the narrative and make Dark Reading Matter not just unreadable but unpublishable. Thursday can’t let that happen and needs to use all her guile and narrative trickery to unmask the antagonists.

It won’t be easy. The Martians have broken out of their HG Wells novel and threaten both the real world and the Bookworld. Agents from a higher reality want unfettered access to the Dark Reading Matter, the realm where deleted books and unrealised literary ideas end up. A Gateway to Hell has opened up at Wantage’s Shakesmania, the nation’s second-worst Shakespeare theme park, and the cosy world of Enid Blyton has been hijacked by Ultra Right Wing Nationalists. With Reality Field Distortion experiments going haywire, a partially redacted donkey, a Bookworld on the brink of losing its imaginative energy to Big Tech and a murderous stamp collector with Philaticide on their mind, Thursday has to navigate a tightrope of borderline unusable narrative devices to bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion.

It’s a tall order, but Thursday has several secret weapons: her own adaptability, her husband, Landen, a host of stalwart friends and ultimately the most loyal compatriots she can call upon—her readers.