Post by Mark T. Locker.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

This week, we’re talking a book for the grown-ups! A couple weeks back, I shared with you part of a series for young adults by Jasper Fforde, a book all about magicians and magical creatures. But before he launched into YA fiction, Jasper Fforde wrote several offbeat mystery novels for adults. The first of these novels, often described as “metafiction” was The Eyre Affair.  It’s not easy to summarize the unusual world created by Fforde, but suffice it to say that literature and literary figures are so lauded that there is a special branch of operatives who deal specifically with crimes of a literary nature. Often that is little more that fake original manuscripts or “lost” poems of great writers. But when the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit is stolen under inexplicable circumstances, things get much more serious. When a minor character from the novel suddenly disappears from the book, and his body is found in modern-day London, the mystery becomes deadly serious. And Lit Tec operative Thursday Next may be the only one who can get to the bottom of it all.

I’ll admit this book is totally weird. I also can’t wait to go on and read the other books in this series. This one focuses, as you might suspect, on the Brontë novel Jane Eyre. I believe that there is some Hamlet in the next one! And who knows what else in the others? So if you think you’d enjoy metafiction (fiction about fiction) this one is great to read as a bedtime story to yourself.