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Book Summary and Reviews of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Thursday Next Series #6

by Jasper Fforde

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  • Mar 2011, 384 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Jasper Fforde's exuberant return to the fantastical BookWorld opens during a time of great unrest. All-out Genre war is rumbling, and the BookWorld desperately needs a heroine like Thursday Next. But with the real Thursday apparently retired to the Realworld, the Council of Genres turns to the written Thursday.

The Council wants her to pretend to be the real Thursday and travel as a peacekeeping emissary to the warring factions. A trip up the mighty Metaphoric River beckons-a trip that will reveal a fiendish plot that threatens the very fabric of the BookWorld itself.

Once again New York Times bestselling author Jasper Fforde has a field day gleefully blending satire, romance, and thriller with literary allusions galore in a fantastic adventure through the landscape of a frisky and fertile imagination. Fans will rejoice that their favorite character in the Fforde universe is back.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Fforde's diabolical meshing of insight and humor makes a 'mimefield' both frightening and funny, while the reader must traverse a volume that's a minefield of unexpected and amusing twists." - Publishers Weekly

"More metafiction fun from the best-selling Fforde - maybe not the easiest place to join the series, but a must-read for fans." - Library Journal

"Your appreciation of Fforde will depend solely on your tolerance for self-conscious, and occasionally slick, literary cleverness." - Kirkus Reviews

"Fforde's books are more than just an ingenious idea. They are written with buoyant zest and are tautly plotted...They also have more twists and turns than Christie, and are embellished with the rich details of Dickens or Pratchett." - Independent (UK)

"A riot of puns, in-jokes and literary allusions that Fforde carries off with aplomb." - Daily Mail (UK)

"Forget all the rules of time, space and reality; just sit back and enjoy the adventure." - Sunday Telegraph (UK)

This information about One of Our Thursdays Is Missing was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Cloggie Downunder

a brilliant read
One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing is the sixth novel in the popular Thursday Next series by Welsh author, Jasper Fforde. Not long after the Remake of BookWorld, it seems that Real World Thursday Next is missing. Written Thursday (Thursday 1-4 from First Among Sequels, the huggy one) has been trying to play Thursday with dignity, but the series is virtually unread, so the presence of an understudy allows her to investigate with the help of Sprocket, a clockwork butler she has acquired (everyone needs a butler). This instalment features Men in Plaid as enforcers, a Triumph Bonneville, inter-genre cabs, a book sabotaged by rhetorical worms, a geologist thrown from a window, and a car chase. Written Thursday travels to the Real World, meets the real Landen, is kidnapped by a Wiltshire Stiltonista, tries to interpret obscure clues to Thursday’s whereabouts, travels up the Metaphoric River, meets some Loser Literary Siblings (The Mediocre Gatsby, Brian Heep, Tracy Capulet, Sharon Eyre etc) and is finally offered a job with Jurisfiction. Concepts like character assassins, a mime field, the Large Metaphor Collider and the intricacies of a character’s backstory are also a source of entertainment. Fforde still delights with some absurd names like Keitel Black, Red Herring and D.J. Growling, and each chapter is prefaced by a pertinent passage from Bradshaw’s BookWord Companion, which, we note, runs to at least fifteen editions, confirming that Colonel Bradshaw’s eventual retirement must have been profitable. As always, Fforde is incredibly clever: this is a brilliant read.

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Author Information

Jasper Fforde Author Biography

Jasper Fforde was born in London on January 11, 1961. His father was a prominent economist, while his mother did charity work and was a passionate reader. Fforde and his four siblings were raised in London and Wales. At the age of twelve Fforde was sent to Dartington Hall School, a progressive coeducational boarding school near Totnes, Devon, which he attended until his graduation in 1979.

As a child, he shared his mother's love of reading, and by the age of eleven, had become quite interested in film and television. While the young Fforde liked to watch Monty Python, he was particularly influenced by a commercial he saw for milk starring actor Roger Moore. It showed what happened behind the scenes on a production set, and this commercial inspired Fforde's aspirations as a movie ...

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Name Pronunciation
Jasper Fforde: Ford

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