In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously.

Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. After two rollicking New York Times-bestselling adventures through the Western literary canon, Britain's Prose Resource Operative was literally and literaturally at her wit's end -- not to mention pregnant. So what could be more welcome than a restful stint in the Character Exchange Program down in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots? But a vacation remains elusive. In no time, Thursday discovers...

"Fourteen years after she pegged out at the 1988 SuperHoop (in Something Rotten), Thursday Next is grappling with a host of new problems in the BookWorld: a recalcitrant new apprentice, the death of Sherlock Holmes and the inexplicable departure of comedy from the once-hilarious Thomas Hardy novels. The Council of Genres is trying to broker a peace deal between certain antagonistic genres: Racy Novel has been recklessly placed between Ecclesiastical...

The BookWorld's leading enforcement officer, Thursday Next, has been forced into a semiretirement following an assassination attempt, returning home to Swindon and her family to recuperate. But Thursday's children have problems that demand she become a mother of invention: Friday's career struggles in the Chronoguard, where he is relegated to a might-have-been; Tuesday's trouble perfecting the Anti-Smote shield, needed in time to thwart an angry Deity's...