One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (2011) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

show spoilers

Characters/People edit see section history

show spoilers

• Thursday Next: The missing title character. She is an agent for both SpecOps and JurisFiction and is scheduled to host Peace Talks in the Book World. She is married to Landen Parke-Laine and has two children, Friday and Tuesday.
• Whitby Jett: salesman for EZ-Read of BookWorld, character with no backstory whose book was deleted long ago; took on the backstory of a colleague who killed a busload of nuns transporting orphaned puppies
• the written Thursday Next: BookWorld, written character of Thursday Next, not to be confused with the RealWorld Thursday Next. She has many opportunities to "pass" as the real Thursday.
• Carmine O'Kipper: candidate for understudy position to BookWorld Thursday Next ID A4-5619-23
• Sprockett: a mechanical butler/former action hero rescued from stoning by the written Thursday Next; he becomes her butler
• Lola Vavoom: BookWorld character whose death scene is prevented by a falling piece of book breakup; her BookWorld character is based on a biography of the RealWorld Lola Vavoom.
• Regional Commander James "Red" Herring: BGH-87 character type; overall leader of the BookWorld Policing Agency
• Martin Lockheed: Add a description of this character.
• Friday: Landen & Thursday's son
• Tuesday: Landen & Thursday's daughter - a brilliant inventor like Thursday's uncle Mycroft
• Landen Parke-Laine: Thursday Next's husband, father of her 2 children, Tuesday & Friday. The written Thursday has a big crush on him.
• Speedy Muffler: leader of the Racy Novel section of BookWorld (member of the Axis of Unreadable)
• Kietel Potblack: head of the Swindon Stiltonistas, an illegal cheese dealer in the RealWorld
• Spike Stoker: colleague of RealWorld Thursday Next at SpecOps; he tends to handle the cases the police and other SpecOps agencies don't want to handle.
• Commander Flanker: once head of SO-1, now working for Goliath
• Adrian Dorset: the RealWorld name of Goliath villain Jack Schitt.
• Anne Dorset: Adrian's wife; former head of the Book Project; died on inaugural journey of the Austen Rover
• Mr. Meakle: small, meek-looking man sent to release BookWorld version Thursday Next from Adrian Dorset's captivity- Attorney General for President Redmond van de Poste
• Jenny: RealWorld Thursday at times believes she has a second daughter by the name of Jenny. The Written Thursday can sees an apparition of Jenny.
• Mediocre Gatsby: younger brother of the Great Gatsby - lives in Parody Valley in Vanity - drives for the TransGenre Taxi service
• Tuesday Laste: A fictional character created by the Written Thursday while investigating in the BookWorld. Created to confuse other characters in the comedy/parody region of BookWorld.
• Drake Foden: newly written adventurer, Drake Foden - BookWorld version Thursday Next's companion aboard the Metaphoric Queen - fodder
• Faux Herring

Quotes edit see section history

show spoilers

• “Not many people traveled to the RealWorld, and those who did generally noted two things: one, that it was hysterically funny and hideously tragic in almost equal measure, and two, that there were far more domestic cats than baobabs, when it should probably be the other way around.”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version

• “It's simple: All reading needs to stop for the nine minutes it requires to have the BookWorld remade.”

  Alyona Ivanovna

• “But while spikes in reading were easier to predict, such as when a new blockbuster is published or when an author dies--always a happy time for their creations, if not their relatives--predicting slumps was much harder.”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version

• “Our lone reader had stopped and left us dangling in a narrative dead zone. It's an odd sensation: a combination of treading on a step that isn't there, someone hanging up the telephone midspeech without an explanation and the feeling you get when you've gone upstairs for some reason but can't think why. Scientists have proven that spaniels spend their entire lives like this.”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version

• “I was mildly concerned over her eagerness to hit Snooze. To discourage misuse, every time the button was pressed, one or more kittens were put to death somewhere in the BookWorld. It was rarely used.”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version

• “The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version

• “Being fictional is a double-edged sword. You get to savor the really good times over and over, but the same is true of the bad.”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version

• “Villains haven't been allowed to be albinos for years, identical twins as plot devices are banned, and double negatives are a complete no-no. Forget anagrams.”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version

• “"In that case," said Sprockett, "I'd better lay out your things. Will madam be staying long?""Twelve hours.""I'll pack you a toothbrush, a scrunchie and some clean socks."”

  Thursday Next, BookWorld version/Sprockett

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• I was reminded of Clarke’s Second Law of Egodynamics: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

  Highlighted by 83 Kindle customers

• Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he’d have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

  Highlighted by 52 Kindle customers

• About ten degrees upslope of Fiction, I could see our nearest neighbor: Artistic Criticism. It was an exceptionally beautiful island, yet deeply troubled, confused and suffused with a blanketing layer of almost impenetrable bullshit.

  Highlighted by 27 Kindle customers

• “Epizeuxis,” murmured Sprockett, “a rhetorical device that repeats the same word in the same sentence for increased dramatic effect.

  Highlighted by 26 Kindle customers

• I moved quietly to the French windows and stepped out into the garden to release the Lost Positives that the Lady of Shalott had given me. She had a soft spot for the orphaned prefixless words and thought they had more chance to thrive in Fiction than in Poetry. I let the defatigable scamps out of their box. They were kempt and sheveled but their behavior was peccable if not mildly gruntled. They started acting petuously and ran around in circles in a very toward manner.

  Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers

• The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.

  Highlighted by 23 Kindle customers

• The trip back downriver was uneventful and over in only twelve words.

  Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers

• It’s an odd sensation: a combination of treading on a step that isn’t there, someone hanging up the telephone midspeech without explanation and the feeling you get when you’ve gone upstairs for some reason but can’t think why. Scientists have proved that spaniels spend their entire lives like this.

  Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers

• To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.

  Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers

• She spoke to me of her latest project: a plausible method to crack one of the most intractable problems in modern physics, that of attempting to instill a sense of urgency in teenagers.

  Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Vanity Island: an island off Fiction island inside BookWorld - "a bizarre mixture of the best and worst prose, where iambic pentameters of exceptional beauty rubbed shoulders with dialogue so spectacularly poor it could make one's ears bleed." pg. 252
• Dark Reading Matter (DRM): the unseeable part of the BookWorld
• Swindon: RealWorld town where (RealWorld) Thursday Next and her family live.
• The BookWorld: Once reorganized, it appears as an inverted sphere. All areas of fiction and non-fiction have places within BookWorld where characters reside, waiting for readers.

Organizations edit see section history

• Council of Genres: ruling body of BookWorld; creates the laws and grants exceptions to those laws.
• Jurisfiction: Fiction Police; enforces laws and investigates complaints in the BookWorld .
• Metaphor Squad: part of Text Grand Central
• Book Traffic Control: agency of BookWorld
• Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department (JAID): a department of the Book Traffic Control Agency of BookWorld. One of its functions is to investigate accidents that occur while books are being moved from one place to another to determine if it was a fluke and unlikely to be repeated or if there is a problem that needs to be fixed so it does not happen again.
• Out-of-Print Brigade: Moves books that are no longer being read.
• Men in Plaid: A special police type force created for a specific purpose. Almost never seen without their cars being somewhere nearby.
• Narrative Clunker Unit (NCU): Add a description of this organization.
• Guild of Detectives
• Toast Marketing Board: An agency to promote Toast. They approach The Written Thursday Next to mention them in the Thursday Next books in exchange for a fee.
• TransGenre Taxi service: Provides transportation within BookWorld.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• glottal stop: –noun Phonetics .1.a plosive consonant whose occlusion and release are accomplished chiefly at the glottis, as in the Scottish articulation of the t- sound of little, bottle, etc.2.a stop consonant, without release, having glottal occlusion as a secondary articulation, as in yep for yes, nope for no.
• graphemes: letters and punctuation -- the building blocks of the textual worldEverything in the BookWorld is constructed of them
• metamyth: stories within stories
• epizeuxis: a rhetorical device that repeats the same word in the same sentence for increased dramatic effect
• pastiche: literary or other artistic genre that is a "hodge-podge" or an imitation
• gravopause: in BookWorld, the precise altitude where the force of gravity from below cancels the force of gravity from above
• litotes: a figure of speech in which understatement is employed for rhetorical effect. e.g. "The bottom dropped out of the litotes market, which, as anyone will tell you, was most undesirable."

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by First Among Sequels, and followed by The Woman Who Died A Lot.

Preceded by Never Knew Another, and followed by Elantris.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Jasper Fforde (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Emily Gray (Narrator) - Recorded Books (2011)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PR6106.F67 O64 2011
• Dewey: 823.92

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Add a note to help parents select a book for a child.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Jasper Fforde's Website: Author's website.
• One of Our Thursdays in Missing Special Features: author interview, delted scenes (potential spoilers).