Something Rotten: Thursday Next Book 4

Description

Thursday Next, Head of JurisFiction and ex-SpecOps agent, returns to her native Swindon accompanied by a child of two, a pair of dodos and Hamlet, who is on a fact-finding mission in the real world. Thursday has been despatched to capture escaped Fictioneer Yorrick Kaine but even so, now seems as good a time as any to retrieve her husband Landen from his state of eradication at the hands of the Chronoguard. It's not going to be easy. Thursday's former colleagues at the department of Literary Detectives want her to investigate a spate of cloned Shakespeares, the Goliath Corporation are planning to switch to a new Faith based corporate management system and the Neanderthals feel she might be the Chosen One who will lead them to genetic self-determination. With help from Hamlet, her uncle and time-travelling father, Thursday faces the toughest adventure of her career. Where is the missing President-for-life George Formby? Why is it imperative for the Swindon Mallets to win the World Croquet League final? And why is it so difficult to find reliable childcare?

Jasper Fforde traded a varied career in the film industry for staring out of the window and sucking the end of a pencil. He lives and works in Wales and has a passion for aviation.

'Don't ask. Just read it. Fforde is a true original.' -- Sunday Express 'Ingenious - I'll watch Jasper Fforde nervously' -- Terry Pratchett on The Eyre Affair 'Jasper Fforde's imagination is a literary volcano in full spate ... SOMETHING ROTTEN is arguably Fforde's best book yet ... Fforde has a knack of creating memorable characters whom the reader greets like long-lost friends ... Buy it; chuckles guaranteed.' -- Independent 'Jasper Fforde has gone where no fictioneer has gone before. Millions of readers now follow ... Thank you, Jasper' -- Guardian 'The best yet, which is quite remarkable considering how good the others were.' -- Sunday Express 'The complexity of the plotting is le Carre-like in its ingenuity; the back-story detailing is Dickensian both in its vividness and in its depth; Umberto Eco would recognise an erudition that challenges his own (and far surpasses that of the hugely-overrated Dan Brown), and Orwell would have been proud of the persuasiveness of the depictions of the evil influence of multinational conglomerates, as exemplified by the Goliath Corporation, and of the inescapable misery and squalor of totalitarian communism as evinced by the Socialist Republic of Wales (national motto: "Not Always Raining"). One has to consider Jasper Fforde in the context of his predecessors in surreal comic fantasy - Lewis Carroll, Thorne Smith, the Goons, the Monty Python team, Douglas Adams, Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett and the rest - and in many ways he not only matches their genius, but actually transcends it.' -- War Correspondent - the Journal of the Crimean War Research Society