Kicking off the year of reading for 2008, Stephanie Forward introduces a light-hearted romp.

We’re seeing in the New Year on the Forum with a scintillating literary romp. Super-sleuth Thursday Next is a woman with a mission, and we are joining the valiant LiteraTec as she strives to protect hapless fictional characters from the villainous Acheron Hades.

Our heroine needs to cross the Prose Portal if she is to protect and preserve one of the most popular figures in nineteenth-century literature: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

As we face the thrills and spills of the chase we will have to gird ourselves to endure a barrage of ingenious allusions, a surfeit of apostrophes and ampersands, and some seriously excruciating word-play.

Why was the Anglo-Welsh border closed in 1965?

May Pickwick the pet dodo plock-plock once too often?

Can Mr Quaverley regain his rightful place in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’?

Will Thursday succeed in rescuing her Aunt Polly from the amorous William Wordsworth?

Might she identify the playwright who REALLY penned Shakespeare’s dramas?

Could there possibly be a resolution to the one hundred and thirty-one years of conflict in the Crimea?

Shall Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester attain the dénouement they truly deserve?

And – more importantly – is it too late for Thursday to find lasting love with Landen Parke-Laine?

All these questions and more – oh dear yes, many, many more – will be addressed as we venture into the surreal world created by Jasper Fforde in The Eyre Affair. So let’s leap into Thursday’s colourful Speedster! All roads lead to Swindon (and Haworth…..).

Discuss the book in the forum.