Jasper Fforde was born in London, England and spent almost twenty years working in the film industry. He worked on movies which included Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. His desire to become a novelist and create his own works, drove him to begin writing in 1988. He spent the next eleven years writing in secret and producing novel after novel in order to discover his own writing style.
Fforde received over seventy rejection letters from publishers before his first novel The Eyre Affair was finally accepted by Hodder & Stoughton in July 2001. The novel is set in 1985, but in a reality alternate to our own. In this reality the Crimean War has been raging for 131 years and people own cloned dodos as their pets. Thursday Next, the heroine of the story is a literary detective, whose main job is to spot forgeries of well-known novels. Her pursuit of master criminal Acheron Hades, however, has her not only changing narrative plot lines of beloved books, but also rescuing characters who have been kidnapped from their novels.
The Eyre Affair was well received by critics and reaped innumerable lavish reviews. He also received high praise from the press and booksellers as well as readers in the United Kingdom. In the United States, The Eyre Affair entered the New York Times Bestseller List in its first week of publication. Fforde went on the write six more novels featuring Thursday Next.
