The Well of Lost Plots

by Fforde, Jasper

• ISBN13: 9780670032891
• ISBN10: 0670032891
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-23
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

Jasper Fforde has done it again in this absolutely brilliant feat of literary showmanship. Join Thursday Next as she encounters some of the greatest characters in literature and battles deadly villians who literally leap off the page. When it comes to sheer wit, literate fantasy, and effervescent originality, nobody can touch this new Ffordian tour de force. -Lost in a Good Bookappeared on The New York Timesextended bestseller list and was a San Francisco Chroniclebestseller -The Eyre Affair was a New York Timesbestseller and a Book Sense76 Pick -Penguin will publish Lost in a Good Booksimultaneously -The fourth book in the series is forthcoming from Viking

Author Biography

Jasper Fforde is the author of Lost in a Good Book and The Eyre Affair, the first two books in the Thursday Next fantasy/detective series.

Table of Contents

Thursday Next: The Story So Far ...	p. xiii
Author's Note	p. xv
The Absence of Breakfast	p. 1
Inside Caversham Heights	p. 14
Three Witches, Multiple Choice and Sarcasm	p. 26
Landen Parke-Laine	p. 35
The Well of Lost Plots	p. 43
Night of the Grammasites	p. 63
Feeding the Minotaur	p. 73
Ton-Sixty on the A419	p. 82
Apples Benedict, a Hedgehog and Commander Bradshaw	p. 91
Jurisfiction Session No. 40319	p. 99
Introducing Ultra World	p. 112
Wuthering Heights	p. 123
Reservoir near the Church of St. Stephen	p. 135
Educating the Generics	p. 136
Landen Parke-Somebody	p. 145
Captain Nemo	p. 152
Minotaur Trouble	p. 159
Snell Rest in Peece and Lucy Deane	p. 172
Shadow the Sheepdog	p. 189
Ibb and Obb Named and Heights Again	p. 204
Who Stole the Tarts?	p. 223
Crimean Nightmares	p. 234
Jurisfiction Session No. 40320	p. 244
Pledges, the Council of Genres and Searching for Deane	p. 257
Havisham--the Final Bow	p. 265
Post-Havisham Blues	p. 272
The Lighthouse at the Edge of My Mind	p. 280
Lola Departs and Heights Again	p. 287
Mrs. Bradshaw and Solomon (Judgments) Inc.	p. 295
Revelations	p. 307
Tables Turned	p. 317
The 923rd Annual Book World Awards	p. 329
Ultra Word	p. 347
Loose Ends	p. 354
Heavy Weather (Bonus chapter exclusive to the U.S. edition)	p. 363
Credits	p. 375
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1. The Absence of Breakfast The Well of Lost Plots. To understand the Well you have to have an idea of the layout of the Great Library. The library is where all published fiction is stored so it can be read by the readers in the Outland; there are twenty-six floors, one for each letter of the alphabet. The library is constructed in the layout of a cross with the four corridors radiating from the center point. On all the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, are books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leatherbound, everything. But the similarity of all these books to the copies we read back home is no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject; these books are alive.Beneath the Great Library are twenty-six floors of dingy yet industrious subbasements known as the Well of Lost Plots. This is where books are constructed, honed and polished in readiness for a place in the library aboveoif they make it that far. The failure rate is high. Unpublished books outnumber published by an estimated eight to one. THURSDAY NEXT, The Jurisfiction Chronicles MAKING ONEiS HOME in an unpublished novel wasnit without its compensations. All the boring day-to-day mundanities that we conduct in the real world get in the way of narrative flow and are thus generally avoided. The car didnit need refueling, there were never any wrong numbers, there was always enough hot water, and vacuum cleaner bags came in only two sizesoupright and pull along. There were other more subtle differences, too. For instance, no one ever needed to repeat themselves in case you didnit hear, no one shared the same name, talked at the same time or had a word annoyingly ion the tip of their tongue.i Best of all, the bad guy was always someone you knew of, andoChaucer asideothere wasnit much farting. But there were some downsides. The relative absence of breakfast was the first and most notable difference to my daily timetable. Inside books, dinners are often written about and therefore feature frequently, as do lunches and afternoon tea; probably because they offer more opportunities to further the story.Breakfast wasnit all that was missing. There was a peculiar lack of cinemas, wallpaper, toilets, colors, books, animals, underwear, smells, haircuts, and strangely enough, minor illnesses. If someone was ill in a book, it was either terminal and dramatically unpleasant or a mild head coldothere wasnit much in between. I was able to take up residence inside fiction by virtue of a scheme entitled the Character Exchange Program. Due to a spate of bored and disgruntled bookpeople escaping from their novels and becoming what we called PageRunners, the authorities set up the scheme to allow characters a change of scenery. In any year there are close to ten thousand exchanges, few of which result in any major plot or dialogue infringementsothe reader rarely suspects anything at all. Since I was from the real world and not actually a character at all, the Bellman and Miss Havisham had agreed to let me live inside the BookWorld in exchange for helping out at Jurisfictionoat least as long as my pregnancy would allow. The choice of book for my self-enforced exile had not been arbitrary; when Miss Havisham asked me in which novel I would care to reside, I had thought long and hard. Robinson Crusoe would have been ideal considering the climate, but there was no one female to exchange with. I could have gone to Pride and Prejudice, but I wasnit wild about high collars, bonnets, corsetsoand delicate manners. No, to avoid any complications and reduce the possibility of having to move, I had decided to make my home in a book of such dubious and uneven quality that publication and my subsequent enforced ejection was unlikely in the extreme. I found just such a book deep within the Well of Lost Plots amongst failed attempts at prose and half-finished epics