Thursday Next
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Thursday Next is the protagonist in the series of novels by Jasper Fforde. Thursday is an agent with the Swindon SpecOps department 27, the Literary Detectives or LiteraTecs, which means she investigates cases that seem rather bizarre but are perfectly normal in this parallel world such as illegal book trafficking, bootleg poetry etc.
Thursday lives in a parallel late-eighties, where England has been fighting the Crimean War for more than a hundred years with a Russia that still has a Tsar, there is no United Kingdom, Wales has become the "People's Republic Of Wales", England is a republic and apparently Operation Sealion was carried out successfully. In the world of Thursday Next, literature is a much more popular medium than in our world.
Thursday is in her mid-thirties at the start of the first book, and, by the end of said book, had married Landen Parke-Laine. Thursday juggles her work in Swindon and the world of fiction, battling the machinations of the insidious Goliath Corporation, members of the Hades family and other evils at every turn. Her biographer, "Millon de Floss", reveals more about her life at the beginnings of chapters in "The Eyre Affair", "Lost in a Good Book", "The Well of Lost Plots" and "Something Rotten".
Her father Colonel Next is a rogue member of the ChronoGuard (SpecOps 12), a temporal policing agency, and does not officially exist, having been eradicated by his former bosses (using the simple but effective method of a timely knock on the door just before his conception, despite which his children and grandchild still exist, likely due to Friday Next being the eventual head of the ChronoGuard). He does, however, remain at large throughout the time-space continuum, and still frequently finds time to visit Thursday, usually by stopping time around her so they can talk without her father being arrested by the ChronoGuard. Colonel Next's first name is unknown to everybody but him, a consequence of his eradication. Thursday has two brothers, Anton, who died in the Crimean War, and Joffy, who is a minister for the Global Standard Deity (GSD).
Thursday also has a pet dodo called Pickwick. Although dodos had been extinct for some time, in Fforde's fictional universe they have been reintroduced through cloning, a popular hobby. Pickwick was 12 in 1985, when The Eyre Affair is set, and has some unusual characteristics, including missing wings. She is a version 1.2 Dodo, and the DNA sequencing wasn't complete until the release of 1.7. Although initially Thursday Next believed Pickwick to be male, she later turned out to be female when she laid an egg. Her noise is represented as "plock plock" in the books.
Around Thursday Next a fictional world has been created, reflected in several websites of the fictional organisations.
The fifth Thursday Next novel is due to be published in July 2007. The title will be First Among Sequels - despite an announcement in Fforde's most recent book, The Fourth Bear, which listed its title as The War of the Words. See Fforde Grand Central for further details.
[edit] External links
- Thursday Next
- Website of the fictional organisation SpecOps
- Website of the fictional organisation Goliath Corporation
- Website of the fictional city Swindon in the parallel universe
| Novels by Jasper Fforde | |
| Thursday Next series | |
|---|---|
| The Eyre Affair | Lost in a Good Book | The Well of Lost Plots | Something Rotten | First Among Sequels (unpublished, due July 2007) | |
| Jack Spratt series | |
| The Big Over Easy | The Fourth Bear | |
