The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde 💙📚

Jodi Taylor #BookRecommendation

Sometimes, especially if I’ve been a bit busy, it’s good to pick up old favourites. At the moment it’s Lord of the Rings – which I haven’t read for decades and it’s really interesting to compare my mindset in 1972, which was when I first read it – to now. I am not the same and neither is the book. Which is really interesting.

I’ve just ordered The Eyre Affair – on Kindle, sadly because print gives me some problems. It’s the first of the Thursday Next series and, I think, the best.

I remember I first read this when I was working for the Library Service in North Yorkshire and I was excited by it because it was so different from anything I’d read before. And another one not set in London.

One of my colleagues in the School Library Service was also a huge fan – she actually had an Eyre Affair sweatshirt which I really, really coveted. We spent hours discussing plot points and arguing. She preferred The Nursery Crimes Series but I’m a Thursday Next girl through and through.

The story was so out-there – I just loved it – imagine being at an airport or railway station and popping your money in a vending machine and getting a Shakespeare sonnet.

Or – and this is my favourite part – the description of the audience-participation performance of Richard III. Picture an entire audience shouting:

‘WHEN is the winter of our discontent?’

And Dick the Turd roaring:

‘NOW is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer sun by this son of York ‘

and everyone in the audience putting on their sunglasses and looking up at the sun. If they’d performed Shakespeare like that at my school then it probably wouldn’t have taken me years to get around to appreciating him properly and not lumping him in with Thomas Hardy and boiled cabbage.

Anyway, the plot’s quite well known – The Eyre Affair, not Richard III – Thursday is racing around trying to fix the novel Jane Eyre together with her love life. Simultaneously. Because both have careered disastrously off the rails. There’s time-travel and Neanderthals and dodos and literary jokes and dreadful puns. If you haven’t already read it – give it a go. When I moved to Turkey and had to squeeze everything in one small suitcase The Eyre Affair was actually the third of the ten books I allowed myself.

If anyone’s interested – and please remember this was in the days before Kindle – the ten books were, in no particular order:

Persian Fire – Tom Holland

Faking It – Jennifer Crusie

The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

The Seven Daughters of Eve – Bryan Sykes

Guards! Guards! – Terry Pratchett

Legacy – Susan Kay

The Book, the Film, the T-shirt – Matt Beaumont

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

The Sacred Art of Stealing – Christopher Brookmyre

Have you enjoyed this book too?

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