One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde *****

BookWorld is where books live ... the characters, the settings, the plots live there. This is where the imaginotransference engines run day and night to transmit the books from BookWorld to the reader's imagination. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde is the sixth in the BookWorld series. If you are familiar with Terry Pratchett, and if not you should be, you can imagine BookWorld as the DiscWorld of metafiction - fiction about the process of fiction.

Like all good fantasies, One of Our Thursdays is Missing begins with a map: Fiction Island spans from Vanity and Fan Fiction in the south to Women's Fiction and Racy Novel in the north; Crime and various thrillers in the west to Fantasy and Horror in the east. The plot centers around the disappearance of heroine Thursday Next and the control of valuable metaphor deposits.

Thursday Next (not the RealWorld one, but the BookWorld one) is chased about both worlds through text sieves, on river boats, and flying TransGenreTaxi taxis. She is shot at and erased, but in the end she triumphs. A wonderful literary romp reminiscent of Terry Pratchett at his best.