Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair puts you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable-- someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence
