Jasper Fforde has done it again in this absolutely brilliant feat of literary showmanship. Join Thursday Next as she encounters some of the greatest characters in literature and battles deadly villians who literally leap off the page. When it comes to sheer wit, literate fantasy, and effervescent originality, nobody can touch this new Ffordian tour de force. - Lost in a Good Book appeared on The New York Times extended bestseller list and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller -The Eyre Affair was a New York Times bestseller and a Book Sense 76 Pick -Penguin will publish Lost in a Good Book simultaneously -The fourth book in the series is forthcoming from Viking Adult/High School–Fforde's third novel featuring English sleuth Thursday Next is an interesting, enjoyable mix of detective story, fantasy, and literature. Thursday works on cases involving the protection of the stories and characters of famous books, which can be affected and changed by people in the real world. In this installment, she enters the Book World itself. Fforde has a nice touch, never pressing on any one aspect of the story, but managing to interweave all of the elements, with a good deal of humor. The use of various literary characters means that it helps to be familiar with the works in which they appear, but, despite knowing very little about Anna Karenina , it is still very funny to read its plot written as a gossipy telephone conversation between two Russian noblewomen. It also helps to have read the first two books in the series, The Eyre Affair (2002) and Lost in a Good Book (2003, both Viking), but teens will want to read The Well of Lost Plots anyway. –Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Anyone who thinks there's really nothing new in fiction hasn't been reading Fforde's wildly inventive, genre-bending Thursday Next series. Next is a detective who inhabits a fantasy-world Britain in which literature is very much alive--so alive, in fact, that it takes a dedicated machinery of justice to keep the plots in order and the characters in place. After rescuing a kidnapped Jane Eyre in The Eyre Affair (2002) and battling an evil multinational corporation seeking to exploit the world of fiction in Lost in a Good Book (2003), Next has beaten a strategic retreat into BookWorld, where as part of the Character Exchange Program, she hides out in an unpublished, by-the-numbers police procedural. She's pregnant, her husband has been killed before he really existed, and her memories of him are being eaten away by a mindworm. She can't rest for long, however; she's still a trainee agent in the BookWorld police force, JurisFiction, and soon fiction itself is under a greater threat than ever before. Fforde is a terrifically agile writer, and his central conceit--that books are not constructed by authors but by a busy parallel world of goofy but industrious creatures--allows him to deck this tasty cake of a book with seemingly endless layers. Amid the humor, wordplay, and fun with fiction's conventions, there's both a decent mystery and a book lover's plea to save the world's messiness from corporate streamlining. This will surely delight bookworms--and real people, too. Keir Graff Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Brainier silliness is hard to find." -- Entertainment Weekly "Enchanting . . . a tale to savor. Harry Potter fans outgrowing Hogwarts should dive in." -- People "Head-spinning narrative agility. His novel is satire, fantasy, literary criticism, thriller, whodunit, game, puzzle, joke, post-modern prank and tilt-a-whirl." -- The Washington Post Jasper Fforde traded a varied career in the film industry for staring vacantly out of the window and arranging words on a page. He lives and writes in Wales. The Eyre Affair was his first novel in the bestselling "Thursday Next" series. He is also the author of the "Nursery Crime" series. It's a little difficult to describe the Thursday Next novels without making them sound precious and twee. In fact, they are somewhat precious and twee, but also great fun -- especially for those with a literary turn of mind and a taste for offbeat comedy in the tradition of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, Norton Juster and Lewis Carroll. Indeed, one of the pleasures in reading the three installments of the adventures of Thursday Next lies in recognizing the myriad bookish allusions, some obvious, some very sly indeed. For instance, in The Well of Lost Plots a character is about to be auctioned off as "Lot 97." Fans of Robert Heinlein's juveniles will remember that Citizen of the Galaxy opens with the words: " 'Lot 97,' the auctioneer announced. 'Boy.' " Even more obviously, this new book -- my favorite in the series so far -- also includes a brief appearance by Gully Foyle (the hero of Alfred Bester's science fiction classic The St