About this title: Jasper Fforde's third Thursday Next novel finds his heroine pregnant and working for Miss Havisham in the department of Jurisfiction. The legal stuff is getting her down, and a temporary assignment at the Well of Lost Plots, subbing for a vacationing character in a truly awful unpublished detective novel, sounds like more fun. But the crime, vice, and general mayhem Thursday discovers top anything she has seen yet. And to make matters just slightly worse, someone seems to want to kill her....
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 02/2004
ISBN-13:9780670032891ISBN:0670032891
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 375 p. Contains: Illustrations. read more
"This is the third installment in the Thursday Next, literary detective series, and to my mind the best so far. For this novel we leave (mostly) the alternative England of the first in the series, pass through (often) the BookWorld highlighted in the second of the series, and come to know Thursday's refuge and hiding place from the evil mnemonomorph (love that word!) Aoris Hades, the Well of Lost Plots. This is the place below the Library of Book Two where incomplete or unformed literary works begin. Thursday arrives on a character exchange program and takes up detective apprenticeship under the formidable Miss Havisham of Great Expectations,(a riveting mentor I personally envisioned in the image of the character actress Reta Shaw, such a strong and forceful woman in Mary Poppins, Pollyanna, and the Ghost and Mr. Chicken).
I enjoy the barrage and overload of characters from a wide range of fiction interacting with each other in this lively novel, and the way Fforde expands this complex cosmology, while playfully teasing literary history, production, and consumption, and throwing in some weighty reflections on bureaucracy, organized religion, media technology, and pop culture along the way. We meet a pair of flat shallow generic characters early on, ibb and obb, and I came to really care about them as they evolved into the well rounded supporting characters of Lola and Ronald. Rather than try and explain the complicated plot and the Byzantine workings of the Well (and the Library above it), let me just encourage all to read this series in order.
I read a used American edition, which promoted the fact that it had an additional chapter added. I found this a bit tacky, personally. The novel ended much better without the addendum, even though I wasn't reading it for aesthetic nuance but rather for some escapist folderol. The addendum would better serve as a short story in a collection of short stories eventually released about BookWorld. I realize the author enjoys breaking new ground and entering new worlds, as it were, with each volume, but these places could all serve as the settings for many more entertaining stories or tales, and collections of short stories flushing them out some more is something he could always come back to later."
"So far Thursday Next novels seem to have a very positive trend - the first one was very good, but the next ones keep pushing the bar upwards relentlessly. Jasper Fforde continues to use some plot devices that I don't much care for, resulting in two-three unsatisfactory chapters in this book, but overall his offering is brilliant.
His writing is fluid and snappy at the same time (there is one particular segment that would put Lewis Carroll or any absurdist in shame), his dry literary-refencing humour hits my ballpark really well, and most importantly, the world he is weaving is just an incredible work of imagination. In The Well of Lost Plots we are presented with overview and numerous details about the creation process of books, and I'm sure the scenes ring very true to anyone who has ever worked on a story of their own."
"This was the best in the series so far. Set entirely in the BookWorld, this novel really lets rip with the imaginative use of language to bend perception of reality. It has the added advantage that the author can draw on classic characters such as Miss Havisham, Heathcliff and Mrs Tiggly-Winkle, which nicely makes up for his weakness in creating and handling his own original characters.
This is just my take on it, but I've had trouble identifying with or liking his original characters, whose motivations seem rather pasted on, the most memorable of all having so far been Bowden, who was actually written as a flat boring person, and Spike, who is a bit of a riff on several stereotypes. Considering that even the original characters in The Well of Lost Plots were more entertaining than in all the preceding series and that these were actually written out as fictional rather than "real" tells you that maybe there is something to stereotypes after all, at least in the context of an adventure sci-fi novel. A plain stereotype is nothing - but mix and contradict it, and you've got something. Thursday herself seems like a character created by the author trying to avoid every single detective cliche: she is not male, lonely, a drunk, or strangely irresistable to the opposite sex, nor does she wear a trenchcoat; and just to contradict the female stereotype to boot, she's not young or beautiful, either. It's hard to build a full character out of negatives, though.
That being said, the books are definitely worth a read for their whimsy and cleverness as well as such fantastic scenes as an audience participation Richard III and shootouts at Wuthering Heights, and this last one well makes up for any faults in the characterisation of the previous novels."
"I think out of all the Thursday Next books this is my favorite so far, although they are all good. In the third installment of the series we find our girl Thursday living in the fictional world and apprenticing to become a Jurisfiction agent, the fictional version of her outlander job of So-27. In her desire to avoid the parties in the real world out to "detain" her while her bun is in the oven, she gains a residence in the Well of Lost Plots and begins her new career.
I found this book to be wildly inventive, and thought that half the fun of reading was trying to pick out all the literary characters that Fforde uses throughout the novel. Miss Havisham, of Great Expectations fame, is Thursday's mentor in Jursifiction and there are rage counseling sessions for all the major characters in Wuthering Heights. Indeed. At one point there is even a phone line that is crossed and the reader (and Thursday) get a mini crash course in the events of a great Russian novel.. the gossip way!
Fun, smart, fast-paced and a great read. I can not recommend this book highly enough!"
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